Philadelphia Inquirer Article

This is when and where the problem started...

Posted on Thu, Jun. 11, 2009


Dealership fighting back against closures
By Maria Panaritis

Inquirer Staff Writer

Fred Beans taught his daughter Beth to use a sledgehammer when she was 12. They busted down a wall together 31 years ago in their Doylestown new-car showroom.

Yesterday, father and daughter brushed up on their swing and took aim at Washington and taxpayers, whose bailout billions for U.S. automakers were enabling bankruptcy plans that Beans said were putting good local citizens out of business.

Beans, among 1,300 General Motors Corp. dealers with franchises the automaker recently said it wanted to eliminate, has launched a public relations and government-lobbying campaign against further closures, including an impassioned, full-page ad in yesterday's Inquirer.

"I believe right is right and wrong is wrong, and I'll be damned if the federal government gave GM billions of dollars, and gave executives millions of dollars to go away, to put me out of business in Doylestown," said Beans, 70, who last month learned his GM dealership in Limerick, Montgomery County, would be phased out by 2011 under GM's government-backed bankruptcy plan.

"I don't think so," he said.

In his advertisement, which also ran in a Capitol Hill publication widely read in Washington, Beans wrote: "I ask for your help to ensure that GM's bankruptcy does not cost our families their livelihood."

His network of 22 dealerships, with headquarters in Doylestown, employs 1,500 people across Southeastern Pennsylvania. Other dealers on GM's closure list are enduring in anonymity. The company has not made public the names to be phased out.

Beans has appealed the decision. But as the reality has sunk in of the May 16th letter from GM, father and daughter have gone from nearly giving up to instead gearing up for a scrappy fight.

Father and daughter have hired a Washington lobbyist, talked with lawmakers and rallied other dealers to push back against closures that have come down en masse as part of the bankruptcies of General Motors and Chrysler L.L.C.

Pennsylvania is expected to be one of the hardest-hit states because of its high concentration of dealerships selling vehicles from the embattled Big Three automakers - Chrysler, GM and Ford Motor Co.

Beans and a small group of fellow local dealers met face-to-face Saturday in the Doylestown office of U.S. Rep. Patrick Murphy (D., Pa.).

"It was clear to me that they need help, and that they haven't been given a fair deal, and haven't been allowed to state their case for why they should stay in business," Murphy said in an interview yesterday from the Capitol.

Murphy said manufacturers have been "reckless in the way they've been closing small businesses such as Fred Beans' dealership in Limerick." He said the closures were having "terrible effects" on the local economy and that he was pushing his colleagues to help give dealers a chance to stay open.

At Murphy's urging, the Beans team spent the last few days assembling testimonials from employees. Copies of 500 letters written by Beans employees were sent to Murphy, U.S. Rep. Jim Gerlach (R., Pa.) and U.S. Sens. Arlen Specter and Bob Casey Jr., both Pennsylvania Democrats, the Beans folks said.

One employee praised the Beans family for loaning him money to buy a house; another was thankful for the scheduling flexibility that allowed her to go to college while working for Beans; another talked about how she was the sole provider for her family.

"I am urging you to stop this needless destruction of so many lives," wrote one.

For now, the goal is to advance legislation introduced this week in the U.S. House of Representatives that seeks to restore franchise protections to dealers.

Even though Beans has a sprawling network of dealerships beyond the one singled out by GM, he said that being forced to close his Buick Pontiac GMC site in Limerick could bankrupt the entire business, much of which is built on selling cars produced by the struggling Detroit Big Three.

There is a $3.5 million mortgage on that Limerick property, in the middle of an automall. Beans built it, and Beans wants to keep it open until he decides to shut it, if ever. It's his, after all, he said.

"We built the buildings, we bought the signs, we bought the cars," said Beth Beans Gilbert, 43, vice president of the business, describing how dealerships are the product of local capital investment. "If we don't have a franchise, the buildings are no good."

The Beans' full-page ad appeared the day after 11 local Chrysler dealers went dark because of the company's dissolution of 789 franchise agreements nationwide as part of its own, earlier, bankruptcy reorganization backed by the Obama administration.

Those Chrysler dealers, some of whom had been in business for three generations, were the first to vanish through Bankruptcy Court orders that voided their rights under state franchise laws.

Given the Obama administration's support of both bankruptcy plans, the political prospects of any bill reversing the dealer closures remained unclear.

"If this bill doesn't pass, it's the disintegration of the franchise laws and the American dream and going into business for yourself," said Beth Beans Gilbert, who has worked furiously to orchestrate the rescue lobbying effort with her father.

"I've paid taxes all my life, and I was in the military," said her father. "I never thought the federal government would give $50 billion to General Motors and Chrysler to put me out of business."




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Contact staff writer Maria Panaritis at 215-854-2431 or mpanaritis@phillynews.com.


http://drivingtimes.fredbeans.com/2009/06/fred-beans-fighting-back-against-dealership-closures/

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100 Years Later

Ford Motor Company's Position.

Homage to mechanics, who labor in obscurity

Thursday, September 11, 2008

Ford: Trim 4,200 more workers

Dearborn automaker hopes latest round of buyouts will reduce surplus of hourly employees.
Bryce G. Hoffman / The Detroit News

Ford Motor Co. told leaders of the
United Auto Workers that it still has about 4,200 more hourly workers in its U.S. plants than it needs, and it is hoping the latest round of blue-collar buyouts will help shrink that figure.

That was the message Ford executives delivered to union officials in closed-door meetings Tuesday and Wednesday. They outlined Ford's plan to restructure its North American manufacturing base and discussed progress on the latest in a series of buyout efforts aimed at convincing workers to head for the exits voluntarily.

While Ford did not set a target for this round of buyouts, it told UAW leaders that it still has more than 4,000 workers than it needs to build cars and trucks, said company spokesman Mark Truby. That is about the same figure Ford's head of manufacturing and labor relations, Joe Hinrichs, gave analysts in a conference call last week.

The Dearborn automaker has trimmed its North American hourly work force by about 40 percent over the past three years through voluntary buyouts, early retirement offers and attrition. However, its most recent attempt to cut another 9,000 workers came up short, with fewer than half that number signing up for one of the packages.

Since then, the company has announced plans to drastically cut production at some plants and retool others, changing some from truck and SUV production to factories that will build small cars and crossovers. The company has also made significant cuts to overtime, which it hopes will convince more workers to sign up for the voluntary buyouts this time.

The company also has hosted several job fairs to convince workers to take buyouts and recently created a Web site, www.yourjobconnection.org, to help workers who leave the company.

Ford, like General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC, is working to bring its work force better in line with the market and to help stem losses it has incurred in North America.

The Dearborn automaker lost $8.7 billion in the second quarter and its U.S. sales are down 15.6 percent through August, according to Autodata Corp.

You can reach Bryce Hoffman at (313) 222-2443 or bhoffman@detnews.com.








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