Are you suggesting that because some companies were mismanaged, people should suddenly allow themselves to be exploited in an effort to make it easier for companies to "not die"?

Everything is worth sacrificing to the owner class. /s

> Saab died

Under GM management.

> Under GM management.

There's a reason they ended up as a GM brand.

Saab was facing insolvency when GM bought 50% of the company. Would you have preferred the brand to die sooner?

Frankly? Yes. The drawn out death rattle was annoying to follow.

But if you list the causes of SAABs demise you get pretty far down the list before coming to "2 months vacation and 36 hour workdays" (it's 25 days and 39 hour work weeks btw).

So what were the causes? I was a Saab fan so I'm curious.

SAAB was never really a car company. It was an aerospace company that ended up owning a car manufacturer due to some mergers and ran its car division more like an eccentric hobby. The car part was never really well run or financially self-sufficient and that just became more obvious when the car part was eventually split off from the aerospace part.

edit: Just correcting my history slightly. SAAB actually started their eccentric car hobby before merging with a car manufacturer, partially due to to the end of WW2 leaving them with a surplus of engineers and capacity and wanting to put them to some use. The rest of my point basically stands

I'm sure someone has a good writeup, but as to my understanding they had a really weird lineup where the 9-5 competed with 9-3 and both were basically low-end luxury sedans marketed as family cars.

> The drawn out death rattle was annoying to follow

You're saying that a company that employees thousands of people should have died earlier and cost those folks their jobs because....it annoyed you personally?

You’re right. That was a poor choice of words on my part. My point was that it was obvious SAAB cars (neé SAAB Weapon Systems) wasn’t a viable business and the last few years were extremely drawn out and full of drama.

Why did GM have to buy them out?

More socialist countries are inherently bad a creating and maintaining profitable businesses.

So selling off a failing company on the open market to the highest bidder is socialist. But governments bailing out a failing car manufacturer to the tune of billions of tax payer dollars is free market capitalism? Got it.

They sold it off because they were bad at making money and keeping it running.

Your second sentence it a strawman. Of course it's not capitalism to bail out manufacturers. How's that working out for the US? All you've proven is that when the US implements socialist policies it's detrimental. So, thanks for proving my point.

Lmao imagine just ignoring that Mercedes, bmw, porsche, Wolkswagen, Lotus, Mini, Audi, Skoda, Renault exist. Even Japanese and Korean workers are getting better deals now, why would you suck the boot, specially only to let someone like Musk enjoy more soirees at Epstein's

I'm legitimately curious if there are studies or any kind of evidence that backs up your claims. Specifically, evidence that shows causation between more vacation days and lower worker productivity leading to companies shutting down their businesses.

In manufacturing? What do you think happens when an employee doesn’t show up to the line because of high PTO or low working hours? Magic fairies run the assembly process for free?

Manufacturing does not work like software engineering. There is an extremely direct link between people showing up to the job and parts rolling off the line. The workers aren’t watching YouTube for half the day.

Cheap labor and general low regard of your employees also mean that there is less incentive to improve your manufacturing with automation or simply by looking at what the factory workers struggle with and improving that part of the chain.

It is not as simple as you picture it.

Then simply...hire more people?

Sounds like a net benefit for everyone, frankly

That lowers productivity, which is the topic in question.

Huh?

Let's say 1 worker works 40 hrs/week, but gets a day off every second week, i.e. 70 hrs/2weeks.

I need to hire a worker to keep productivity the same on that day off.

Now what if 9 other workers are staggered with their days off? My worker has a full time position (well, they need to have a day off too, but for the purpose of example.

"We need someone to work when people are off" being plugged by someone who is, implicitly, covering multiple people's days off keeps productivity exactly the same.

And if you make 100 widgets a day as a worker, you make 100 a day that you're working - we don't count your day off and say "Oh, you're only making 90/day now, worker productivity is lowered!"

PTO is paying people to not work.

There is no financial difference between paying someone to not work one day every two weeks, and having them show up that day but not do anything (which we can agree would be unproductive).

Paying someone to stay home, and then paying someone else to cover them, reduces productivity of the factory because it requires more total labor to produce the same number of parts.

You can argue that the person will be more refreshed or whatever, which I think is probably a good argument for many types of jobs that are not manufacturing line work.

People who have engineering or creative jobs constantly think that you can get the same work out of four days as five. And for their jobs, because they have significantly decreasing marginal productivity per hour worked, they might be right. But that's very different than line work. The 40th hour worked does not have appreciably different productivity than the 35th hour worked in a week on a line.

If it's about productivity at all costs, then let's just go back to 12 or 16 hour days, 6 or 7 days a week.

PTO is a "fringe benefit". Factoring it into productivity levels is orthogonal, as its goal is to increase desirability of the employer, not to ensure "maximum output per employee".

That's what I'm saying - productivity per employee doesn't change. They still make the same widgets/hour on the line on hour 1, hour 35 and hour 40 of their week. The company just employs 1.1 people to run that line full time (well, 40 hours a week, leaving aside 24/7 ops for the sake of simplicity) rather than the mathematical minimum 1 person.

> Paying someone to stay home, and then paying someone else to cover them, reduces productivity of the factory because it requires more total labor to produce the same number of parts.

Maybe it's the pedant in me as I approach an MBA program, but while there are multiple definitions of productivity, in industry it's usually an expression of the output as a factor of input. And generally it's the equipment that's the limitation. A factory whose equipment can produce 200,000 widgets/year can still only produce 200,000 widgets/year, even if you have twice as many employees working 20 hour weeks, i.e. productivity is the same.

"I work just as hard, I just don't work as much."

PTO just another part of total compensation. If you offer less PTO you have to offer more salary to compensate and vice versa. In fact I suspect many people value PTO higher than their actual monetary value, so offering it is a financial win for the company.

This is a vibes based argument though. I can make similar claims about how improved worker satisfaction will lead them to work harder, make less mistakes on the line, boost morale and have a multiplied effect on productivity as they not only work better themselves but the entire team works better if they're happier. There are even some studies to back up these claims, so I was just curious if there's evidence to the contrary.

Maybe they don't care.

The thing about values is they only count when they're actually tested and have consequences.

SAAB didn’t die, they just didn’t care about making a profit selling cars. Fighter jets are much, much, much more profitable.

Considering the market cap of SAAB AB vs the top 15 automotive brands today, this is patently untrue.