Podcast-style conversation (Service Driver Ev) between hosts Chris Collins and Christian discussing automotive industry labor issues and hiring best practices. They cover the pending UAW strike, President Biden's comments, debates about union impact on dealership operations and technician productivity, and the idea of unions partnering on training/recruiting. The tone is conversational and opinionated, with focus on operational impacts and industry implications.
Chapters
Welcome, everybody, to the big show. Today we talk to an expert from hirology on best practices for hiring. And some. Some of the stats are pretty crazy.
Frightening. No, not frightening. Informative. Yeah, for sure, informative.
And then we unpack the pending UAW strike. That and much, much more. Coming up on Service Driver Ev.
How's it going, Christian?
Great. How are you doing today?
You want to get right to the news?
Kind of. I feel like it's a, it's a hot topic, really. At the end of the day, the main thing in the news right now is the UAW strike.
I was super interested. So I think that they're, you know, they're trying to work on the contract here, and dealers are starting to put contingency plans in for not being able to have the parts and everything like that. And I thought it was super interesting that President Biden weighed in and he gave his two cents on the.
He thinks that they're not sharing the profits.
Yeah. So I think that he was pro, pro worker on that. And it's interesting. I mean, I do think that, you know, the, the way that the dealerships have. Well, not the dealerships, but the manufacturers also have been making more money.
You could make a case that they have an opportunity to give back and do the right thing. So. But at the same time, you know, what's going to happen if they go back and they do a contract and they pay everybody more money, give more benefits? What's going to happen to the car prices?
They're going to go down.
They're going to go exactly down. Yes. But, but I don't know. How do you think this affects the rest of the industry?
If I went to a dealership and I said, hey, here's the deal. My techs and my union all run it 100% efficient. We have a standard of the quality of work that we do. We are investing in training and recruiting tech. So anytime you need a new tech, we'll send you more techs. And we also are providing a great, you know, pension plan for these guys. Like, we're, you know.
That seems to me like a fair deal. Like. But most of the time the unions are protecting the underachievers and they're holding the dealerships hostage. In a lot of senses, it's not a, it's not an even exchange of values most of the time. I mean, there's a lot of. There's a lot of guys that, that having a union shop diminishes the quality of work, the customer experience, and their ability to to turn a profit. There's. There's. I mean, I don't know how many dealers would line up for a union that actually did the recruiting and training and had a standard of what they were willing to accept. Like, if I want to get rid of a technician that that's 40% efficient, I got to ride them up three times, I got to meet with the union, I got to do all this stuff. What if the union took an active role and they were looking at efficiency, they were looking at productivity, and there was a standard of, hey, yeah, we're a union, but we have a certain pride about what we do as a quality of work and as production. Unions rarely ever want to talk about production. They're. They're saying, well, the production's on you. And it's like, yeah, but you're taking away all the tools I have. Like, if we all want to have a good quality of life and we all want to make money, you can't keep taking away the production off the table and the quality and your commitment to it and just keep giving entitlement.
Right?
Yeah.
There's got to be a focus on the finished product.
And so in these. In these, you know, in these negotiations, you don't hear the. The guy from the union, I forget his name. You don't hear him talking about, hey, we're going to partner with manufacturers and help you navigate this change to electric. Help you Nav. No, they're saying, we want you to guarantee jobs. We want you to cut the work week. We want.
