Workplace Issues Today
Daily News for Thursday, November 5, 2009
Selected by the Catherwood Library Reference Staff each Monday through Friday, excluding University holidays, WIT is a free alert service, providing abstracts and links to workplace-related news stories covered in the major media. Subscribe to WIT »
Established in 1999, this service also includes a searchable archive.
GM deal collapses, workers protest
Workers in Germany are protesting the collapse of the GM deal to sell majority shares of its Opel and Vauxhall divisions. Union representatives said that they were afraid that GM would cut more jobs than would have been cut in the deal with Opel. Under that agreement, no factories would have been closed. Officials in the U.K. and Spain had opposite reactions to the collapse of the deal. While Spain said that they would not make concessions beyond those in their deal with Magna, the U.K. officials said they were happy to work with GM. GM has said that it will cut around 10,000 jobs, but not where those jobs will be cut.
See “Opel U-turn sparks German strikes,” BBC News Online, Nov 05 2009 (SD)
Worker productivity rises as labor costs decline
A Department of Labor report says that productivity rose at a rate of 9.5% in the third quarter. Labor costs fell at a 5.2% rate, larger than the 4% decrease economists were expecting. This comes as companies continue to lay off workers, meaning that productivity rose with fewer workers working at lower wages. Analysts believe that the unemployment rate could reach as high as 10.5% by next summer, before beginning to go down. The Federal Reserve has pledged to keep interest rates low to encourage consumer spending in hopes of stimulating the economy and the job market.
See “Productivity advances at fastest pace in 6 years in 3Q as labor costs fall sharply,” by Martin Crutsinger, Chicago Tribune, Nov 05 2009 (SD)