How To Get Rich Quick: Lose Your Job At Opel, Collect $360,000
After tedious negotiations, and only after an arbitrator was brought in, GM’s Opel finally has a deal for its Bochum plant in Germany. As planned, 1,800 jobs will be cut. The deal will cost GM dearly.
According to Automobilwoche [sub], workers who leave will receive golden parachutes of up to $360,000 a head. You did read right. 300 workers will get a job in Rüsselsheim, and up to $36,000 for being inconvenienced by a move 150 miles south.
If workers hurry and leave, or decide to go south, before June 15 comes around, they can pocket another inducement to the tune of up to 5 months salaries. Ka-ching!
Bertel Schmitt comes back to journalism after taking a 35 year break in advertising and marketing. He ran and owned advertising agencies in Duesseldorf, Germany, and New York City. Volkswagen A.G. was Bertel's most important corporate account. Schmitt's advertising and marketing career touched many corners of the industry with a special focus on automotive products and services. Since 2004, he lives in Japan and China with his wife <a href="http://www.tomokoandbertel.com"> Tomoko </a>. Bertel Schmitt is a founding board member of the <a href="http://www.offshoresuperseries.com"> Offshore Super Series </a>, an American offshore powerboat racing organization. He is co-owner of the racing team Typhoon.
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@GS650G and tallnikita: +1. As if I needed yet another reason to not ever buy a GM product, mass murderer T shirts!
Why does it seem that every comments section these days descends into a bunch of girly-man whining about politics and not cars? I don't know what website all the intelligent posters went to, but I need to find it. Yes, 360k is a lot of money, and no, not everybody will qualify for it. Line workers are usually compensated based on years of service. But 360k is more of a severance package than the engineers got.
Bertel sure is good at chumming up the right wing sharks into a feeding frenzy. I guess his years as an ad man served him well. Unfortunately for Herr Schmitt, I can actually read German, and I've found some much better information. The 360K figure he quoted was a voluntary retirement program. These workers have a government matched retirement fund, which, for the highest paid worker after 30 years could potentially allow them to get $360,000 (Roughly speaking, due to exchange rates.) If we do some division, we find that their retirement fund has 12k a year. So even if we assume that all of these workers are making the maximum pay (Which they are not)at the plant, the vast majority of them will receive nowhere near that amount of money, as they have not been around for 30 years. When the union returns my e-mails, I should be able to get far more complete numbers. Bertel, I'm not trying to be an asshole here, but you should at least TRY to make some effort to do fact checking. That's the difference between a journalist and a propagandist.
"Che Guevara was an animal who gloried in death and destruction" Sounds like Bush