you don't know the reason the factory closed.

the belgium goverment makes it the most expensive country for companies, to employ people.

a worker there costs over 47€ while in most EU countries it is 27-37€

the goverment there demands higher payments such as healthcare, taxes and higher hour payments, this is the reason ford is closing in belgium, the reason they are pissed is because there is probaly no other work in belgium for them.

just like the factory that closed in The netherlands last year :)

since companies want to make more profit in these times, it's a obvious choice their leaving belgium.

Mr. Ford himself once said "cars don't buy cars"…

It's the union effect again. Unions, like mafia, make demands and then use force to get paid. Instead of breaking legs, they strike and cripple the plant until the company gives in to the demands for higher pay. Once the company does this, the criminals, I mean "unions", realize that they can do this again and again until they bleed the company dry and/or the company decides to get rid of the plant. It's simple self preservation. At least here in the USA, unions are singlehandedly responsible for the near death of the domestic auto industry. They are parasites. They don't care if their wants eventually kill the host, they want what they want right now!

I was a member of a union for years. I watched it from the inside. I was harassed until I joined, which I joined because the union had forced the company to give them the dental and vision care parts of the health insurance. This meant that in order to get dental or vision care, you HAD to join the union.. Interesting way to FORCE people to join, no? I paid my excessive union dues and I watched meeting after meeting where the only topics were how to get more from the company even in the face of reduced revenues and how they could gain more political power. I'd say that the most powerful person in the company was not the CEO, he was the union boss. You do know that the unions and mass media are partners in the USA, right? That's right, mass media makes unions look like the good guys. Maybe in other countries it's different, and it certainly was different in the age where there were no worker's rights laws and people had to stand up for each other, but today, unions are nothing but forces that pay politicians huge amounts of money to sway government in their favor while living off the dying hosts of companies.

EDIT: I DO agree that mass media and education are criminal. They both have agendas that are clearly in their own favor, not the favor of the consumer. Unions are exactly the same way now though. They give HUGE amounts of money to government figures in return for "favors". I'll also agree that food is junk now and all people want better, but people are still monkeys and monkeys will take and take and demand bigger and better for cheaper until there is nothing left. We are nothing but greedy monkeys looking to gather shiny objects to elicit the affection of other monkeys and to assert stature over others.

I was a union guy for several years. Yes, the union sought to improve salaries and benefits. But, when the company experienced financial difficulty, the union agreed to salary and wage benefit reductions to keep the company alive. Most unions are willing to do that and have done that, including auto workers and teacher unions.

the union had forced the company to give them the dental and vision care parts of the health insurance. This meant that in order to get dental or vision care, you HAD to join the union.. Interesting way to FORCE people to join, no?

Makes sense to me. The union negotiated health and dental and you seem to want those benefits without supporting the union? You want a free ride eh?

Unions, like many ideas fallowing this philosophy, are well-intentioned... but have devastating consequences in the implementation.

People simply need to look at the results, not ideas. Coming from outside of Detroit, myself, and knowing MANY people (from workers to designers), it was crystal clear that the unions in Detroit lead to the failure. Last I heard from a manager at GM, the line-workers were making as much as 6-year educated management. The message to the next generation was, don't get educated... join the union! The insensitive to become a designer, engineer, or manager dwindled in the 80-90's and as a result... bland, poorly designed, poorly assembled cars, left americans buying foreign. The revenue that was being used for R&D/design, went instead, to manual labor demands. Sales went down, quality went down, union demand kept rising, until boom! Failure.

Philosophically, unions and socialization lead to failure because they are a zero-sum system applied to a non-zero game. They are intrinsically incompatible.

Communism is a religion. :-) Its impossible to reconcile it with logic.

Last I heard from a manager at GM, the line-workers were making as much as 6-year educated management. The message to the next generation was, don't get educated... join the union! The insensitive to become a designer, engineer, or manager dwindled in the 80-90's and as a result... bland, poorly designed, poorly assembled cars, left americans buying foreign.

Okay, looks like you diagnosed the problem with the American Car industry. Rather than go to college, talented young people decided to work on assembly lines straight out of high school. Glad we got this one cleared up.

@brianluce I ended up leaving the job for another 6 months later, nothing to do with the union specifically but the job wasn't what I was lead to believe it to be and the constant BS of not being able to do things to complete my job because union rules said that I couldn't do certain things that others were supposed to do. It left me frustrated and angry, especially stuff like being made to do double shifts with no notice, etc. Actually, the pay was pretty much the same between union and non union at this job to start, at least until you got some tenure and then it went up, way up, and a few years in, you could make more than your manager, who was non-union. I left for a job in a completely different industry and have followed that path as non-union ever since and never looked back. It's cool that you guys defend something you believe in, but it's still killing the industries. Strangling them to death, slowly but surely.

@zcream no doubt. The golden parachutes for these CEOs are ridiculous as well but the CEO is vastly outnumbered in total wage by the employees. At the height of the bubble, Chrysler was paying out something like 6 billion in benefits while only bringing in 3 billion of revenue. That's how bad the union screwed Chrysler. Thankfully, UAW has been backing down and has accepted lower pay scales for new workers in return for a chance at a majority stake in Chrysler.. Wait, what? That's right, a 55% stake in a company that they strangle to death and has been bailed out and sold a few times during the recession, has yet to pay back the majority of it's bailout and is still down like 40% of it's previous sales.. Good bye chrysler! In the name of capitalism we should have seriously let this one fail. Bad cars, Bad management, Bad employment deals, etc. It's no wonder that non-union automakers are making profits, making good cars and are eating our lunch in the auto industry. They don't have to cheapen the cars to make more profit to make up for the excessive wages.

I'm pretty sure that there's 'good' unions and 'bad' unions. I've been told - anecdotally - that when Rupert Murdoch smashed the print unions in London during the 80s there were entire departments of people that literally had no job to do, kept in place only by the union. But, it was also the trade unions that were instrumental in stopping the appalling conditions that industrial workers in the UK used to labour in (circa ~1800s)

Like most things when there's two opposing power structures - do you try and maintain a balance, or hope that the side that has control behaves responsibly?

@brianluce Actually no it's not made up. Your attempt at nullifying anything I say by cherry picking information from some website is feeble at best. Your supposed proof actually shows the numbers. 5.1 billion repaid out of 8.5 billion TARP loan. The rest is write-offs, write-downs, borrowing from other loaners to pay back government loans and of course, 1.5-2 billion of our government will just absolve.

The same website you used, actually has more information on it, further down the page that you might not have read in your giddiness and quick attempt at proving me wrong:

http://www.factcheck.org/2011/06/chrysler-paid-in-full/

"But this is fuzzy math, at best. The fact is that the Obama administration "wrote off" part of the original loan issued under Bush.

When Chrysler filed for bankruptcy on April 30, 2009, the "new Chrysler" that emerged assumed only some of the $4 billion loaned by the Bush administration. In a new report issued last month, the GAO explained that Treasury — under the Obama administration — "wrote off $1.6 billion" of the "original $4 billion loan extended to the old Chrysler."

In its May 24 announcement touting Chrysler's final repayment, Treasury acknowledged that it is "unlikely to fully recover" about $1.9 billion."

So that's a 1.6 billion write-off and a 2 billion absolvement.. 3.6 billion the taxpayer won't get for sure. And now the government has sold it's remaining stock involvement to Fiat, a 1.3 billion loss after they only made about 560 million from the deal:

"Since then, the administration has announced that it will sell its remaining Chrysler shares to Fiat, the Italian automaker that will now own a majority of the U.S. car company. Taxpayers will reap about $560 million from the stock sale, Treasury says. That still leaves taxpayers about $1.3 billion in the hole, and Treasury doesn't expect to ever get it back."

which brings the total loss up to 4.9 billion of loss to the taxpayer. That's about 57% of the secondary 8.5 billion tarp loan that they recieved. So the use of my word "majority" was INDEED correct, but then again, it's hard to think of the numbers when there is so much to take in besides what BS our government and it's union cronies would want you to believe..

http://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/2011/05/25/chryslers-payback-isnt/

EDIT: Oh and even more good info, Chrysler paid back what it did to the US government with LOANS from Canada:

http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2011/05/chrysler-celebrates-payback-acknowledges-outstanding-obligations-sort-of/

cherry picking information from some website

"Some website"? it's non partisan factcheck.org. It's a reputable sources, unlike, I dunno, some random FOX News site like you used.

And the total amount committed by Treasury was 12.5 billion, not 8.5. That changes the math unfortunately. And there's nothing about a 200 billion absolvement. Just read the article again, it's fairly straightforward:

Taxpayer beware: You have to read the fine print to know what the president means when he says Chrysler has paid back "every dime" of loans it received "during my watch." The company got $12.5 billion in bailout funds under the Bush and Obama administrations, but — despite what the president said — isn't expected to pay about $1.3 billion of it.

Anyway, this is too far into the weeds and fine print to hold my interest. If you want to hate on unions and US Auto, go right ahead. Luckily for the rest of us, neither is going away any time soon.