Nothing funny about feldspar

So 47-and-a-half thousand people are retiring from GM and pseudo-GM. I realize that these people are spread out over the US (and Canada? I’m not sure), but that population is roughly half of the population of the city where I live.

It is three times the population of the city I lived in a dozen years ago.

What happens when you throw out retire a city full of people? Everyone who is concerned about their prospects a few years from now will hunker down — they’ll reconsider every major purchase (like houses and cars), they’ll slow down in their discretionary spending (no more eBay!), they might even stop going to the doctor for seemingly minor illnesses to save on co-pays.

Everyone who sees $30 to $100k as a windfall (i.e. something extra) will probably spend it on that boat they’ve always wanted… and then in a few years they will complain about the quality of their retirement, and the union that screwed them. (It’s seldom the company that screws ‘em — it’s the union and its duly elected leadership that made this awful agreement that forced retirement upon the masses.)

In the interim, skilled people “leave,” but are hired back on a temporary basis. The retiree administration office has to hire dozens of temp workers to process paperwork (and heaven help you if you ask one a question, because they just don’t know the answer). Heck, even the union has to hire more people to process their retiree paperwork.

So in effect, GM has exchanged it’s skilled manufacturing workforce for an unskilled paper-pushing one.

Let’s hope that the old saw “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country” is no longer true. We can’t afford it.