Comments on: Tiny Tim Must Die

By: joeaverage

joeaverage — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 18:36:22 +0000

And to think I could go to jail for shop lifting a $100 item at the local big box retailer… (I wouldn’t shoplift).

Top level managment has lost billions yet they’ll get all the perks and benefits coming to them…

By: "scarey"

"scarey" — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 16:50:11 +0000

Mr. Wagoner, FOR WHAT HE HAS DONE TO THE COMPANY, SHOULD BE HANGED BY THE NECK UNTIL DEAD.
Seem harsh ? How much money has he lost the company during his tenure as chief ? And how much has he been paid for this service ? Mere wall street thieves whisper in awed reverence at the mention of his deeds ! Destroying General Motors, and being made lavishly rich in the process ! We bow at the alter of the First Church of the Almighty Bean Counter, and await our fate.

By: BlueBrat

BlueBrat — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 16:01:01 +0000

Still waiting for the self-administered $1 paycheck on Mr. Wagoner…

By: quiksilver180

quiksilver180 — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 06:29:10 +0000

It’s almost like Charles Dickens based Ebenezer Scrooge off of Rick Wagoner. Brilliant!

By: Gardiner Westbound

Gardiner Westbound — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 03:09:01 +0000

You’re right. I misread the savings goal.

By: micpl30

micpl30 — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 02:57:56 +0000

“GM can save $1.2-million by giving Wagoner December off, 24-percent of the $5-billion savings goal.”

It would be 0.024% of the savings goal…

By: joe

joe — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 01:42:39 +0000

Another shallow analysis based on a sad lack of knowledge about the company. Using the obscure search engine “Google” I find the . By combining that with a calender I see that GM’s scheduled to work Monday and Tuesday and that this will allow them to close 3 large complexes 4 days early. They are giving up whatever work the 10 people who weren’t already taking that time off would have done. Wow, I’m sure that would have been epic.

By: ProfessorSlow

ProfessorSlow — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 01:31:13 +0000

This is far less nefarious than it sounds. Federal law requires a company to retain payroll owed to employees until payment, and the company cannot use that cash for anything else; borrowing from the payroll is a surefire way to go to federal pound-me-in-the-tuckus prison. This is to ensure that if you work on Monday, the company has the cash to pay you on Friday, even if it goes out of business on Wednesday (a real concern for GM.) This goes for paid vacation days, too. If you’ve earned them, the company has to hold onto the cash to pay you for them, in some locked box somewhere; it’s like Social Security, except in this case not a child’s fairy tale.

So, if you take paid vacation, the company can use that saved up cash that it can’t use for anything else to pay your salary, instead of having to keep allocating funds to payroll. This improves the profit/loss ratio. Now for GM this is asymptotically approaching Zero anyway, but every little bit helps, and if you do this to a LOT of employees, it can help quite a bit. (Hey, two days ain’t bad. My employer is ‘giving’ us three weeks off this winter.)

By: Gardiner Westbound

Gardiner Westbound — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 00:47:19 +0000

At $14.4-million a year GM can save $1.2-million by giving Wagoner December off, 24-percent of the $5-billion savings goal. It’s probably more than the savings generated by stiffing the little people two days pay.

By: indi500fan

indi500fan — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 00:04:06 +0000

GM (via the gracious negotiating of the UAW) has 8 days as paid holidays in that period.

Asking the salaried folks to take an additional 2 paid vacation days to make it a full 2 weeks hardly smacks of Grinchiness.

By: cjdumm

cjdumm — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 23:37:57 +0000

Many years ago I got laid off on December 23rd, along with two other attorneys and a paralegal.

The managing partner confided that business was a little slow, and he didn’t want to have to pay for a week of paid vacation for each of us. We four ‘terminees’ repaired to the bar after cleaning our desks, and the Scrooge jokes flowed like scotch, er, water.

Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grind- stone, that managing partner! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire…

I know how those poor GM sods must feel.

By: Pig_Iron

Pig_Iron — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 23:05:35 +0000

Harsh but true. He doesn’t care.

By: TexN

TexN — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 22:54:08 +0000

I am outraged! I am a distant relative of Scrooge, and I’ll be damned if anyone is going to compare my kin to Rick Wagoner! Expect to hear from my lawyer!

By: AKM

AKM — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 22:29:26 +0000

I call fool! The real Wagoner would never be as clear, and every word would be MBa’d, CPA’d, and PR’d to death!