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GM "Scapegoats" 2 Employees, Places Engineers On Paid Leave
In the interests of transparency and on the heels of Mary Barra's suggestion that some of those involved in the ignition switch problem are still employed at the firm, she has decided to place 2 employees on paid leave...
- *GM BARRA CONFIRMED 2 ENGINEERS PLACED ON PAID LEAVE
- *GM SAID TO PLACE DEGIORGIO, ALTMAN ON PAID LEAVE
- *GM CREATES SPEAK UP FOR SAFETY PROGRAM FOR EMPLOYEES
To distract from the main headlines, GM has created a "speak up for safety" spy-on-your-neighbor plan as part of her safety-first strategy.
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Absent sabotage, there is no way an engineer is institutionally responsible for this decision. There's no company of any reasonable size in the world that puts business decision-making into engineers' hands.
I agree. An engineer's M.O. is often "We'll get it right if it takes every dime you've got."
They couldn't have just sourced the problem to a faulty slide ruler?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg
http://www.cnet.com/news/this-is-how-an-engineer-feels-when-hes-surrounded-by-idiots/
I always make sure I have at least 2 emails showing that I have notified management of potential issues with systems and that management has acknowledged receiving the information. It doesn't have to be explicit just an email exchange that shows information was sent up the chain.
Engineers on paid leave needed vacation anyway.
That's it, blame "the expert" for the problems.
As an young engineer, I see plenty of this crap all the time. Those in management who have no clue on how to engineer themselves out of a hole give projects to the worker bees that will never work. Prime example, Lockheed's F-35. That is the biggest POS ever!
You DO realize, of course, that more people got 'paid leave' for this GM Crap-switch fuckup that has supposedly killed 13; than those who are responsible for the so-called 'FAILURE OF IMAGINATION' that resulted in the successful false-flag attack on the United States that left 3,000 dead and billions of dollars in property damage (in order that the Pentagram and the MIC could get a contract to build that POS F-35), don't you?
G.M. 'responsibility chain': TWO (and, probably NOT, in reality).
9/11 'responsibility chain': ZERO.
MS, it is quite simple with all MIC contracts. I used to work for one of the theives. Here is how the game works. First of all, intentionally underbid a project from the start to win the contract realizing it will at minimum take 10-20% more in cost to actually deliver goods. Once you are awarded the contract, intentionally sandbag the process by overhiring and sending K Street reps reporting (lying) to CONgress on how results are delayed. Since the military is dumping money into this prize possession, they will never cut it. Oh, think of the jobs!! Executives pad their pockets and the taxpayers get the shaft. God bless the USA.
You mean this isn't Bush's fault?
How about we fire the dumb bitch who runs GM?
Thrown under the very bus they helped build.
Pretty accurate vid, BTW. 5 people in a room. 4 of them simply redundant, unproductive consumers of Oxygen.
Samuel Bush was an Engineer and served as Director of the Buckeye Casting Co. Buckeye was a Rockefeller company that sold train parts to the Harriman railroad. Of course we all know that Sam's son, Prescott, was a director of Union Banking Company. Union Banking was a Harriman, Brown Brothers company.
My point is that Engineers do sometimes direct major corporations. Albeit, many of these have never actually designed a widget in their life.
They're ISO-9000 and force that on all their suppliers, therefore it can't be a failure of procedures or policies.
If the policy is: "make everything that you can get away with out of plastic", then yeah, no policy failure!
Cangaroo - Up The Irons!
The government is responsible.
GM has been a shitty company for some time now. They are over paid to make shitty cars. Without a government bailout and government sponsored sub-prime auto loans this shit stain of a company wouldn't be in the business of making malfunctioning cars.
A free market would have prevented this problem from ever occurring. Possibly saving lives in the process.
Yea...its hard enough getting up Monday to Friday to go be a conforming modern day slave in this rigged life...
.
But now - you might not even make it to work safely in your vehicle because it might blow the fuck up on the drive in...
brutal.
You could always boycott GM. I have for several years now. Will not buy another GM car... well, except for classics of course.
People think I'm awful for boycotting an American company. Whatever, GM and the rest of the major corporations are nothing but a gold mine for executives and bankers. The days of trickle down wealth are gone (seen Detroit lately)? They refused to modernize technology until the Asians had already taken their markets. They took on huge debt borrowed from banks that created the money from thin-air, then defaulted and charged it to our labor. And now they want me to buy a car from them? Really?
You're not awful.
The car companies have been using the "buy American" mantra to milk undeserved profits from the public in the US since the 1970s. Competition and failure is good, in the mid-70s cars were true piles of shit and the Japanese import invasion on the 80s raised the quality level of all cars immensely.
Conversely companies like GM that survive through financial extortion are dragging down the entire country. GM, GM management, GM financial (whichever name they're using today) and the unions all need to die and make room for a real car company, instead of this crony-capitalist abomination of a state-supported bank that makes cars.
"Comrade Barra, Dear Leader suggest choosing several workers to blame, preferably none of our unionistas and he reminds you that the Aleutian Islands need gulag cooks at this time.
The switch component was both on and off at the same time. Sotero Manufacturing Corporation.
You could not be more correct...this is not even a good effort at a cover-up...bring out the ill fitting red wigs and let's show them how it's done!
Note who was NOT suspended -- the executive who headed GM's Global Engineering from 2008 to 2011 and who was in charge of GM Product Development from 2011 to 2013.
Correct. This is absolutely bullshit - engineers are no more responsible than the guy that cleans the bathrooms at their factories. If an engineer there produced documentation showing these switches were not problematic its because he/she was pressured to do so.
When there is profit to be made engineers may or may not get any additional bonus except for the regular salary while the managers get to enjoy the extra pie. When there need to be an escape goat , engineers will be the first one they throw under the bus even if many parts were used due to cost savings from managers decision.
In the USSR, all industrial and commercial accidents and problems (and as we know, there were many, many) were summarily blamed on any of 3 groups: bandits, saboteurs, and wreckers.
Yet another "oh, they're copying the Bolsheviks again" moment for me.
Here's what an engineer deals with daily, there is no way they are to blame. http://www.cnet.com/news/this-is-how-an-engineer-feels-when-hes-surround...
This is Morton-Thiokol O-rings all over again.
Engineers trying to the right thing get scapegoated and lynched in the media while management pukes with blood on their hands skate.
im betting the engineers that were put on leave were the only ones to strongly voice concerns to their executives of the dodgy parts.
because that kinda troublesome pessimism is an immediate grey mark on your human resources record
As sad as it is, you are probably right.
engineers always want to overdesign stuff. it is the execs who force them to rubber stamp substandard crap. they do accountants the same way so they get a bigger bonus. the dollar per part they saved went straight into executive pay. hang them all.
Bingo. I see it all the time. "Business" overtakes ethics all day long. Those of us who stand up and fight pay for it. But, I prefer to sleep at night.
In my case, my work requires a license and a signature. So, the proverbial buck stops with me. There is no getting around me.
In the case of many other things, management can just sidestep, threaten, etc. to make things happen. In my opinion, criminal actions against the public. Hang em high.
I'm betting the executives included Mary B. These two probably locked horns with her over the years. Time for retribution.
Boy it sucks when you draw the short straws.
It sounds like a bad joke. A dago and a kike engineer walk into the CEO's office....
kike engineer, good one!
GM...the new NASA.
GM's doing Muslim outreach too?
Well, they ARE near Dearborn, Michigan...
Wasn't Barra head of QC? What a fucking joke.
we are running out of choices for great quality everydays cars. toyota is becoming gm ized and honda is left standing alone.
recently sat in a avalon and compared it to my 06 - everything cheapened. independant suspension pulled from corollas.
toyota running on reputation. 08 camrys burning oil. trying to be number one has cost them dearly...
Have you considered a Kia Bongo truck?
Lol KIA jinx.
Funny, in the UK and Japan it was a Mazda Bongo.
I just converted a Nissan NV200 1.5TDI into a campervan, and I am way, way, way pleased with it :)))
Cheers!
I think the Korean KIA is heading in the right direction. Not trying to rip your eyes out, offering very long warranties and build quality is improving significantly. Good luck to them.
forgot about kia, yea but wow the fucking bling look doesn't do it for me...
Hyundai's aren't bad and you get what you pay for.
Quality matches price atleast for them. Can't be said for the US makers.
New Game, it's Tesla to the rescue!
Honda is still pretty good but has slipped a little since '08 as well. Hyundais will surprise you, they've come a long way in the past decade.
Toyota is a victim of growing too fast -- they had a great reputation and people running away from the crap other producers made forced them into an unsupportable expansion that compromised quality.
CEOs get huge pays, bonuses, to run company, but when shit happens, they become deaf, dumber, and blind..
..but lie ...
I'm in marketing.
When sales goes super good, it's thanks to sales and my glorious boss.
When sales is down it's my fault. Always.
CEOs and the President.
sabotage or not but that also means there's no quality control in the plants when the cars get shipped out.
I like how GM announced the suspension of the engineers...and then FORGOT to include their names. So they have to do a re-press release to make sure everyone knows the scapegoats and their families.
GM is pure evil
Let me propose an alternate theory: they didn't name the engineers because "Figment" and "Imaginary Friend" would give the ruse away.
That people still buy their crapy cars blows my mind.
Things are so phony and crony any more. It seems like everytime something bad/out of line/illegal is determined the accused entity is allowed to simply, relatively speaking, walk free with only a slap of the wrist. Err, oh, um, I mean, IF they are a friend of this administration.
And the mainstream media continues to eat up the news clips that aligns with this administration's narrative, regardless of facts.
(I know, I know, this happened under other administrations, too. But seeminly not to this level, and not to the level that the media assists in the cover ups).
I've said this for years now... when this admin is gone there are gonna be lots of great books detailing the true happenings in this administration.
"when this admin is gone there are gonna be lots of great books detailing the true happenings in this administration."
I thought the same thing about Bush, Clinton, Regan, et. al However, once you realize the revolving door between 'industry' and 'government', you realize writing those books would be like slitting your own job prospects. (Unless you have a complete 180 and want to 'switch sides')
The mindset of those with the knowledge, and those under them, is to keep moving up to the next position, the next campaign, the next job. Only if one is no longer looking for the next 'whatever' would there be any incentive to write a great book that tells the truth as opposed to bloviate and puffing feathers.
Usually errors like these are of the systemic nature. 5-Whys or so will get whoever is investigating back to the root cause. So somewhere along the testing and implementation line something changed or was ineffectively designed.
Where I work, blaming fallout like this on the operators/engineers is almost never acceptable.
If I were a CEO at GM, I would look first at management in charge of quality and testing.
http://www.gm.com/company/corporate-officers/mary-barra
Prior to her current position, Barra served as Executive Vice President, Global Product Development, Purchasing & Supply Chain since August 2013, and as Senior Vice President, Global Product Development since February 2011. In these roles, she was responsible for the design, engineering, program management and quality of GM vehicles around the world. She was also a member of the GM Executive Operations Committee and the Adam Opel AG Supervisory Board.
Previously, Barra served as GM Vice President, Global Human Resources; Vice President, Global Manufacturing Engineering; Plant Manager, Detroit Hamtramck Assembly; Executive Director of Competitive Operations Engineering; and in several engineering and staff positions.
...
http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/people/person.asp?pers...
...
Ms. Barra served as an Executive Director of Vehicle Manufacturing Engineering of General Motors Corporation (now Motors Liquidation Company) until July 2009. She served as Vice President of Global Manufacturing Engineering at Motors Liquidation Company from February 1, 2008 to July 2009. She has held a number of engineering and staff positions, including plant manager, Detroit Hamtramck Assembly Plant; executive director of Competitive Operations Engineering; and general director of Internal Communications for GM North America.
...
Whether she had the finally say on recalling these switches or not she sure as hell knew about them considering her positions in the company. Her position as an engineer who was then an executive on whether they should have recalled them in the first place when she was in those positions most certainly are pertinent to now.
Hmm, so you're saying that the fox will get to the root of all those dead chickens...perhaps O.J. will find his wife's real killer after all!
This stupid cunt Mary Barra should stick to making cookies and having kids.
Firing two people at GM makes headlines. Nice fucking shit company you have there Mary - but good job and good luck.
We don't know who is at fault, but we're going to go ahead and put you on leave.
Continuing claims reflect the number of people already receiving benefits. Initial claims from two weeks ago were revised up to 332,000 from 326,000
what, you mean no more "American Built" quality...who whould'a thunk that
If there was an honest change in GM culture, business unit manager(s) should have been called out, not engineers who have had no real authority at GM since Smith (Roger and Me fame).
However, someone did change a part while keeping the same part number. There's an engineering chain of command involved as well as a supplier and a GM purchasing agent relationship that bears scrutiny. That parts drawing required special personalized handling.
If this were Japan, the top brass would have done the honorable thing and killed themselves. In America, they take a golden parachute and wind up on the board of another huge corporation as a highly paid consultant with their own lear jet and high-priced prostitutes on demand.
The huge corporate mentality is still alive and well. Chrysler is the same way.
How about those people at the NHTSA warned about this and fragile Tire Pressure Sensing (TPS) valve stems? These valve stems are made of aluminum and crack in cold weather.
The NHTSA has been called about defects and some administrator takes engineers off investigating if it's deemed too expensive for the company to recall.
How about firing the NHTSA administrators for looking the other way until it becomes a publicity nightmare?
How about abolishing the NHTSA govt. crutch and returning unlimited liability to all those corp.s that make defective products?
A) Does this behaviour surprise anyone? I mean the CEO is a female after all.
B) I want to be on PAID leave too!!! Isn't that more commonly called vacation?
What's the over/under on years before GM needs another bailout? The union model is unsustainable.
Jon Corzine.
Barack Obama.
Lois Lerner.
Eric Holder.
Hillary Clinton.
None of them knew.
None of them.
Here again, company washes it’s hands while blaming an individual employee, crazy!:
“Deutsche Bank AG (DBK) put a London-based currency saleswoman on leave last month for inappropriate communication with the Monetary Authority of Singapore”
FROM: Deutsche Bank Said to Find Improper Communication in FX Case http://www.bloomberg.com/news/print/2014-04-10/deutsche-bank-said-to-fin...
Yea Just say "I don't recall" No pun intended.
I'm shocked that the lying socialist democrat assholes didn't just blame Bush!
Can't get a decent engineer in manufacturing becasue they all work on Wall Street building front-run, squeeze machines...
Watch Micheal Moore's documentary about GM and Roger Smith called Roger and me. An oldie but a goodie. Corruption has been going on since Jesus' clash with the moneychangers
Michael Moore needs to make a documentary about a super-rich fat Socialist who bitches about Capitalism all the while making tons of money at it. And then goes down to Socialist protests like #OccupyWallStreet and whips up the crowd against the 1% which he is a part of. Oh, and a super rich fat Socialist who bitches about certain corporations being unjust and unfair and corrupt, but which he was a stockholder of. That's what Michael Moore should make a movie about.
Hes been quiet lately. I will do a search on him to see if he has anything going on
The ows protesters booed MMoore went he went to mingle with them in a show of solidarity. Loved watching him react with that but but I'm one of you guys. Fuck you MMoore
They should go after the cleaning staff too! No peon should escape the scaffold in GM's quest to save the asses of its top brass!
What about the bean counters that said the extra 50 cents for the longer detent switch would cost too much?
This is about fifty cents? I wonder how many thousands of dollars in analysis it took to take that decision.
The old saying around Motorola was "Talk quality ship shit...."
For something like this to happen GM's entire Quality System/Infrastructure has to be dysfunctional...something like being able to load 6 nuclear tipped cruise missiles on a B-52 and fly them from Minot to Barksdale...leave the 52 parked outside with the weapons...ALL in violation of SOPs and it takes days to figure this out...that's another example of a dysfunctional system.
Which is why you can rest assured that entire B-52 incident did NOT just 'happen'.......but rather was enabled by all the necessary players involved, under orders.
Die already.
When I saw her make the frumpy I just got caught cheating on my wife sex scandal face ( they suck in their lower lip with eyes looking down while inhaling deeply before speaking) I knew right then she was guilty as hell of something.
Here is a picture of her making the sex scandal face. It is like this facial gesture is a programmed (they are trained professionally) thing to get them emotionally in the right mood before expressing false contritness
http://www.autozeitung.de/auto-news/mary-barra-2014-gm-zuendschloss-ruec...
Mary's a sad panda here
http://mashable.com/2014/04/01/general-motors-recall-hearing/
Bull fucking shit she was up to her eyeballs in the problem as an executive whether she had finally say on the recall or not. NSA should be pulling her emails right about now since the corporate office probably has them all cached back at least 7 years since they would count as business records and I'm sure as hell they got that network cracked especially after the government bailed them out.
I remember Hunter Thompson's observation: "Harder to kill than a Buick." Apparently GM still is.
Sounds like a typical public service job. From getting paid to not work at work - to getting paid to not work at home.
It's always the engineers that get in trouble. The executives, especially the CEO (who was an executive and decision maker in product development) will get the kudos and the bonuses.
On paid leave ? Woohoo... free vacation. And of course, management takes no fault. They don't want to show it is a management decision therefore avoiding lawsuits. Ask a couple of guys to take the fault while paying them to keep them quiet.
"course, management takes no fault"
Course managment is a very important part of the game, those engineers need to keep that in mind today as they begin their PAID Vacation.... FORE!
Yea Kinda like the free paid vacation the Fed workers got during the sequester.
A couple stories about GM products….
1) As a young field service engineer, I was hired by a GM electrical parts supplier to service a piece of industrial equipment at their site (service call to a plant near Indianapolis).
I was there to service an RF Plasma cleaning tool (sort of like a huge microwave oven), which they used to clean solid state switches. The equipment had been down for weeks, and it was in horrible condition anyway. There was little to no preventative maintenance, poor documentation, and almost no technical knowledge of equipment principles. Also, there was no back up equipment.
The process performed by this equipment was VITAL to ensuring that the auto parts they built were clean, dependable, and worked correctly. I don’t believe factory staff fully understood this.
2) Many years later, I purchased a Chevy 3500 1 ton truck with a Duramax Diesel engine (great engine BTW). I purchased this from a dealer who had acquired it at auction as a “Lemon.”
There reason it was a “lemon” was because of a faulty solid state relay (which controlled an intake fuel heater coil – a smog device).
What happened was the previous owner got a “check engine” light after ~20K miles. He drove it to the dealer, and instead of correctly diagnosing the problem and replacing this $100 part, the technician decided to cut the leads to the “check engine” lamp in the driver’s display (yeah, I know… what was he thinking??!??). The owner later found out, and made GM take the truck back, and refund him in full.
In GM’s defense, I took it to another dealer in CA and they corrected the problem (replaced the switch), and even gave me a 1 year bumper to bumper warranty.
About 3 years after the dealer replacing this switch it failed AGAIN (3 failed switches in ~8 years) . As I had been through this problem already, I knew exactly what was going on, and how to resolve it (I replaced the switch myself).
The point of my stories is that Quality Control of electrical components was not very good at GM, at least in the 1990s – 2000s.
This ignition switch problem could be because of poor manufacturing processes, and not design faults.
That is what happens when you TBTF a company that shoud rightfully go under. The market has been so perverted that these bloated can go to the government for profits when they can't make the product or it fails miserably in the market place. Cringe each and everytime your government intervenes in the supposedly free market because it will take generations to undo the damage that has been done. Still no talk of responsibility towards the people hurt that is the issue, not the shit rollling down hill responsibility of a couple of engineers that had no control over the quality of a POS product outsourced then jammed into the steering column with hopes it would work out in the end. Just more bullshit avoiding the facts.
Mary is a woman, and she has apologized, so it can't be her fault. Just like Hillary, Lois Lerner, Nancy Pelosi, etc... The CEJ's of the major networks could never pin the fault on those female tools.
Let me guess here, but i would think it was not an engineer who chose not to recall GM cars years ago to fix the problem.
Who in management made the decision?
I just bought a car a couple of months ago. It was not a GM product, and nor will any be in the future.
"ITS OK WE'RE READY"..... GM BARRA CALLS IN NASA to certify vehicles OK to drive...
GM engineers got degrees from matchbook cover mail in diplomas.... instead of the CAN YOU SKETCH THIS DRAWING art degree by error.... we recall your diplomas...
BARRA .....PUT YOU AND YOUR FAMILY IN THE nasa CERTIFIED VEHICLES... MAYBE YOU 'LL WIND UP IN THE NASA MUSLIM OUTREACH STRATOSPHERE...
DONT MATTER IF ITS REAL..... IT LOOKS GOOD see i took immediate strong action.... I R an Executive you know...
Mary now undersatnds why she got the "job".... goat #1
Quality control? At GM?
See........ women can break through the "glass ceiling"
head first with no helmet doing mach one
The European and Asian car companies are engineering-driven. Do you think an MBA, lawyer, or accountant produced a Porsche Turbo?
In today's American car companies, engineers have no say whatsoever in anything that starts with a dollar sign. Not even two cents worth. (This wasn't as true in the 50s and 60s, which is why we had Thunderbirds and early Corvettes and Chevy Impalas.)
Compared to typical highly complex multipoint technical failures, this problem was glaringly obvious. I'm sure that endless memos will be produced in which GM engineers pleaded with the suits to act.
Scapegoating a couple of GM engineers will backfire horribly on this criminal GM management.