The Super Bowl Ad
During Super Bowl 50, Buick announced its first convertible-style car in forty years, the Buick Cascada. The ad, however, did not mention that this new Buick is made in Gliwice, Poland and retails for $33,000. The workers at that GM's plant in Poland make an average of about 30 zlotys per hour, the equivalent to $7.80 an hour. This is about $15,000 per year. Very few of the workers at GM's Poland factory could afford to buy one of the cars that they manufacture, a violation of Henry Ford's rule of paying autoworkers a decent wage. If you add on the cost of shipping these cars from Poland to the U.S., GM's savings is minimal; probably less than the cost of one Super Bowl ad.
The thirty-second Super Bowl ad cost GM $5 million, enough to pay Poland's workers for 650,000 hours of work, or 300 workers for one year. The five million dollars would have been better spent making the cars in Michigan where Buick closed several plants. Instead, these plant closures have decimated the city of Flint. In addition to having toxic lead contaminated water, so many of its residents are now jobless and homeless, too.
The New GM
Four Buick models, all imported. Buick now manufacturers only three models in the United States: the Verano, the Enclave and the LaCrosse. So a majority of Buicks models are now imported. If you really want to buy a Buick, you should buy one of these three domestic models.
I haven't heard of any outcry or autoworker strikes over this massive outsourcing of American jobs. But if you've wondered why workers, and voters, are as mad as hell and voting for Trump and Sanders, you don't have to look much further than General Motors and its Buick division.
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