The Ignorant Investor

Saw this on Bloomberg:

General Motors Co. (GM) will move to entice electricians and its other highest-paid U.S. hourly workers to retire so it can hire lower-wage replacements through a four-year labor agreement with the United Auto Workers.GM, the biggest U.S. automaker, will offer buyout packages worth as much as $75,000 to its roughly 10,000 skilled-trades workers, the Detroit-based UAW said today in a briefing with reporters. Other employees eligible to retire can take $10,000 to stop working within two years so that GM can replace them with new hires starting with wages of less than $16 an hour

Doesn't this sound familiar?  Like the kind of thing the old GM would do in order to curry favor on Wall Street and boost the bottom line?  Take an expensive skilled worker and replace him with a noob who is probably just out of school.  Save a bit of cash, and hope that you don't need someone with experience in that job.  If quality starts slipping, don't sweat it.  Just take a couple of thousand bucks off the price in incentives to move the metal through the dealers.

Toyota doesn't take this approach in its plants.  So why is GM taking a different course? This is exactly the kind of thinking that made American-made cars the non-envy of the rest of the industrialized world.