roger and me
...etroit, at the posh Grosse Point Yacht Club, and at the Detroit Athletic Club. The wealthy citizens of Flint remain oblivious to the class warfare in their town. At one party, unemployed autoworkers are hired to be human statues on the lawn! Before the new jail opens, high society couples pay a hundred dollars each for the quaint experience of spending a night in a cell! At the end, Moore gets a chance to speak briefly to Roger Smith at the company Christmas party but by then the documentary has delivered its hard-hitting messages. The gap between the rich and the poor is growing in the U.S. and the future seems bleak for working class folk. “Our people are our most important asset”. This assertion made in Chapter 11 seems far away from what happened in Flint’s GM plants. This assertion involves that managers see workers as partners. In the movie, workers are just costs to be minimized or avoided. Flint workers are almost meaning nothing to the company. Since 1983, car sales have steadily risen and GM has posted record profits of nearly $19 billion. However, General Motors layed off 30,000 people. It seems like the rules have been changed : you work hard, the company prospers, ...you lose your job. An other important notion is Human resource planning. It is the process by which managers ensure that they have the right number and kinds of people in the right places, and at the right times, who are capable of effectively and efficiently completing those tasks that will help the organization achieve its overall objectives. In “Roger and Me”, it seems that Flint’s plants workers are no longer part of GM’s Human resource plans. In fact, Flint’s plants are useless. The film shows that GM uses its profits to buy data processing companies (EDS), weapon manufacturers (Hughes Aircraft), build new plants in Mexico and Asia and also automate their current assembly lines. This leads us to the “Recruitment and Decruitment” part of Chapter 11. When managers know their current human resource status, they can begin to do something about it. In the movie, it is crystal clear that GM plants are overstaffed. Managers have to reduce the organization’s labor force, by laying off people, to make more profit, even if the company is running well. Another link between the movie and Chapter 11 is “Compensation and Benefits”. Normally, the “profitability of the company” influences employee pay levels. If a company is experiencing declining profits, its ability to offer high levels of pay and benefits will be affected. On the contrary, if it is profitable, it may be able to provide higher pay levels or some type of profit sharing system. However, in the movie, even when making huge profits, GM does not reward its employees. On the contrary, they are replaced by machines. Now that we have discussed on the links between the movie and Chapter 11, I will give my personal opinion of Roger Smith and Michael Moore. When the movie was made, Roger Smith was the chairman of General Motors. His responsibility is to guarantee high profits to GM’s stockholders, and make sure that the company makes the highest possible benefits. By laying off employees, replacing them by machines and relocating plants in countries where workforce is cheaper, he simply makes is job. The purpose of a company is to maximize profit. Everything has to be done to reach maximum benefits. In the movie, he is the “bad guy”, the one who fires thousands of people, who thinks p...