General Motors offers buyouts to 18,000 of 50,000 North American workers

[Hafring]

General Motors offers buyouts to 18,000 of 50,000 salaried worke..

[Sableye]

these are probably workers with lots of benefits and legacy pensions that will get bought out then replaced by a new younger worker without any of the same benefits or pension. The company I work at is doing the same thing, a project I spent 4 months on was shelved overnight as they retired the engineer I was working with.

[meefy]

If you read the article, you wouldn't have to guess.

[Resonant]

Indeed, I know NIssan here in the UK do the same thing, they just shelved a few hundred of their older workers to bring in new blood.

[Mighty AU]

Ahhh speaking in general here, but why is it that American companies seem to, or are expected to, provide so many non-cash benefits? Employer health insurance, employer defined benefit pension plans etc.

How did that actually come to be? Eg my superannuation retirement account is completely separate from my employment, as would private health insurance if I had it. I could change jobs and both would stay with me. That’s the norm here. I dont have to be stuck being unproductive in a miserable job just because they have good pension and insurance plans.

[WuzeyUzi]

Henry Ford pretty much started the trend of "treat your workers well, and they'll treat you well."

He discovered that if you give people a decent life, they're more productive. Who could've guessed.

Right now, we're seeing the opposite strategy as companies chase short-term gains at the expense of all consumers.

[Sableye]

we have no safety net and back in the day companies invested in their employees. In america we tied all of our social services to employment avoiding big government programs and mandates but that very quickly fell apart by the early 70s congress made 401ks to separate retirement from pensions but they didn't really go far enough to separate it from companies, only recently has it been cleared up to allow you to have a 401k that's separate from your employer.

then they dropped a lot of healthcare as costs grew over the 80s and 90s and at the same time unions died off so people began to be more and more reliant on company benefits instead of union benefits, now companies seemingly hate spending anything on employees if they can get away with it and you're finally seeing people start to realize that healthcare and retirement shouldn't have been tied to your employer all along.