Bye bye TVR

[Bobbeh]

More like Capsyspasm

[mr keef]

No, I wouldn't work for £5 per hour. However I work for considerably more than £5 per hour but I don't drive a Lotus. I could get a healthy pay increase and still not afford to be able to drive one. Why do you even think that the people on the shop floor at TVR [should all be driving TVRs? The idea that just because your boss is filthy rich then all the workers should be filthy rich too is bonkers.

 

This country used to be one of the manufacturing engineering world's leading lights (especially in sportscar production) but now everything in the West has simply got too expensive because the workers and the business infrastructure demand too much pissing about and not enough getting the job done.

 

Don't get me wrong. Offshoring is a disgrace. I've seen my industry affected by it. I have lots of friends in other lines of work who may be about to be affected by it. I'm not for one second defending a company that decides to ditch its UK workforce and ship the whole operation out to Indo-China just to shave a bit off the bottom line, but you have to wonder why Toyota is just about the only automaker turning in a profit when the likes of GM, Chrysler and Ford are struggling to make a sustainable loss?

 

I once saw a doumentary on the demise of the UK car industry and one particular anecdote stuck with me: The people who built the cars were working hammer and nails to meet production schedules and the unions were (perhaps justifiably) ensuring that if they worked harder to make more cars, then they got more money. Then the company got some new manufacturing technology in that enabled the same people working the same shift pattern to build more cars more cheaply and more efficiently - just what the company needed at the time. So what did the unions do? They demanded that if the workers were turning out more cars, they should be paid more money. More money for doing a job that just got easier. WTF?

 

Its this complete and utter Western incapability to "get it" when it comes to a working philosophy that IMHO is killing this country. When I worked in conjunction with a company in Japan, my opposite number bought a camper van so that he could sleep in the company car park when he needed to work extra hours. How many people do you know that would do that? I'm not averse doing a good deal of unpaid overtime, but I wouldn't go that far.

 

...and don't think I'm painting myself whiter than white, either. At my next performance appraisal I'm going to have a right old rant about what I'm being paid. Not because I want to go out and buy a flash car or a flash watch or a four bed detached house in the country, but simply because the price of living in my 2 bed semi, paying for food and running my 12 year old car is starting to leave me with a negative cashflow each month. I'm hardly on the breadline but working in engineering in this country is fast becoming a financial non-starter.

 

To go back to "would I work for £5 an hour". In this country, no. But when your whole family can eat out for a fiver and get a room in a five star hotel for Travelodge prices in China its not hard to see why plenty of Chinese would. So for me, the question is really "why the hell has it got so expensive to live in the West?" I'm pretty unshakable in my belief that all the hangers-on in insurance, legal, financial and all the non-value added industries right down to the people who clean your office adding on daft surcharges to cover their support industries' daft surcharges to cover their support industries simply trying to make an extra fast buck is pushing the price of everything up and up and up to the point where its getting unsustainable. GM would rather churn out cars it knows it can't sell because its cheaper for the company to do that than rework their business model for lower production. Insurance would rather continue to rip us all off and move its call centres off shore to increase their profit margin and say bollocks to customer service instead of re-jigging their operation to keep prices competitive and UK worker in jobs.

 

Its too expensive to do anything in this country because we got greedy, and now there's seemingly no going back because no one wants to have to take the plunge and revert to a simpler way of working - and make no bones about it, its because things are simpler in the Far East and other developing countries all over that means thay can sustain their economies on far, far less cash. That's what makes them cheap, and not the fact that they are all poor peasants on starvation wages.

 

You have to much time on your hands:d

[MarkTheBoy]

You have to much time on your hands:d

 

But the man is spot on though

[MONKEYmark]

its like the harder you work the more they look to take off you.u only have to look how things you need for everyday life like gas and electric are shooting up in price but your wage only goes up a small 2-3% if you lucky.

 

well said digsy

[Pete]

He's right. The average UK worker is a lazy bastard that wants too much.

[Gazboy]

Nice rant mate- I didn't make myself clear regarding the works carpark- if they were on rockstars wages, why is their car-park full of £100-£3000 heaps/econoboxes/breedwagons???

 

Agree with everything else