MandA fever's hefty toll on talent - Automotive News
Let's set aside the corporate chessboard to focus on people. The bigger a merger, the more people it affects. Amid industry consolidation, people get overlooked. Mergers can create fresh opportunity for a restructured company and its employees. But mergers come with painful cuts. Sales and production yo-yo year to year. Auto people know the pink-slip/early retirement drill. His favorite memory was one annual outing when he played golf with the president of GM. My mother's worst memory was in 1930, watching her dad lug his tool bag toward the bus station, off to find work somewhere. Post-merger, cutting old machinery is simple. Certainly companies need the productive folks running their best stuff. In every plant I've seen in dozens of countries, auto workers innovate. In a Nissan plant, workers design and fabricate custom machines to speed headliner installation or lift fuel tanks into place as one worker bolts it home. Designers must cut vehicle weight while protecting passengers, including small-overlap frontal crashes in which the crumple zone is mostly hollow. Ford pickup designers added rods in wheel wells to absorb energy and deflect. Source: www.autonews.com
