Social Responsibility Isn't a Threat or Crisis -

Laid-Off Ford Employee Decides To Start Own Car Company

November 13, 2006 | Issue 42•46

HAPEVILLE, GA—Calling his recent layoff "just the kind of a kick in the pants" he needed, former Ford Motor Company autoworker Chris Thaney announced the creation of the Thaney Motor Company Monday.

Thaney at Thaney Motor Company HQ.

"Losing my job was the best thing that could have ever happened to me," said the 34-year-old Thaney, who made $57,000 on the production line as a door fitter until the Hapeville plant closed down last month. "I know cars. I've been around cars for nearly a decade now. I don't need to work for a big, corporate auto manufacturer to do what I love."

"It's going to be great," Thaney continued. "Finally I get to be my own boss, set my own hours, and make my own cars."

Headquartered in Thaney's home garage and financed mainly through his unemployment compensation and United Auto Workers layoff benefits, the new company's credo is, according to Thaney, to "design affordable, versatile and easy-handling cars for ordinary Americans." Saying that his time at Ford taught him "what not to do," Thaney explained that his car company will not be the victim of overproduction and other inefficient practices that have resulted in intensifying competition and declining profits.

"Today's consumers want something made with precision and care," Thaney said. "Not something that was spit out in 58 seconds by a thousand people and some machines."

Preliminary designs for Thaney Motor Company's first model, the Centaur.

Thaney said his cars will be a hit with the public because he will "spare no expense," while still managing to avoid stifling bureaucracy, overpaid executives, and cost overruns.

"As long as I'm in charge, that's the Thaney Motor Company pledge," he added.

"At Ford it was all about the bottom line," said Thaney, who is currently on the lookout for a good source of Italian leather for the upholstery. "With me, the customer will always come first. Well, after the cars."

Thaney said Thaney Motor Company will "go out of its way" to show that its commitment to new ideas and innovation extends all the way to the top of the organization.

"Where Ford went wrong was not going on the Internet to find engines and other parts," Thaney said. "They could have joined one of those online car clubs and swapped stuff for practically nothing, without compromising on quality. "

Already, Thaney is hard at work building his first model, the Thaney Centaur, a four-door station wagon based on his wife's 1999 Ford Taurus four-door station-wagon, whose platform he considers "an American classic in need of some minor retooling." He also has plans to create models patterned closely after the Ford Focus engine, the Dodge Neon chassis, and a friend's 1990 Pontiac Grand Prix paint job. In a nod to his old assembly-line position, the models will boast well-fitted doors and multiple side-mounted mirrors.

Though he didn't want to get his hopes up, Thaney admitted the initial planning phases have left him "very optimistic" and said that he already has several friends and relatives lined up who said they would "definitely" drive a car manufactured by him.

"I'm still trying to figure out how to install airbags, CD changers, GPS systems, steering wheels, and trunks," Thaney said. "But once I learn these things, I'll craft them with precision and care, not like some of the stuff you see coming out of Detroit."

Thaney plans to roll out the first Thaney Centaur by February, but hopes to step up production considerably by the end of 2007 with the creation of three additional vehicles. He projects that his company will be manufacturing at full capacity by the end of the decade and pulling a healthy profit, which he promises to reinvest in the company to enable further new designs and advancements.

"I know I'm taking a risk," Thaney said. "But if you don't streamline and innovate, you won't get anywhere. You need moxie to succeed in this business, and if I can make a better car than the other guy, it will sell itself."

© Copyright 2006, Onion, Inc. All rights reserved.

The Onion is not intended for readers under 18 years of age.

 

Comic-Book Superrman Impervious To Copyediting

May 3, 2006 | Issue 42•18

Illegal Immigrants Returning To Mexico For American Jobs

May 3, 2006 | Issue 42•18

MEXICO CITY—As dozens of major American corporations continue to move their manufacturing operations to Mexico, waves of job-seeking Mexican immigrants to the United States have begun making the deadly journey back across the border in search of better-paying Mexican-based American jobs.

"I came to this country seeking the job I sought when I first left this country," said Anuncio Reyes, 22, an undocumented worker who recrossed the U.S. border into Mexico last month, three years after leaving Mexico for the United States to work as an agricultural day laborer. "I spent everything I had to get back here. Yes, it was dangerous, and I miss my home. But as much as I love America, I have to go where the best American jobs are."

A group of Mexican workers make the dangerous trek home across the Rio Grande for their lunch break.

Reyes now works as a spot-welder on the assembly line of a Maytag large-appliance plant and earns $22 a day, most of which he sends back to his family in the U.S., who in turn send a portion of that back to the original family they left in Mexico. Like many former Mexican-Americans forced by circumstance to become American-Mexicans, Reyes dreams of one day bringing his relatives to Mexico so that they, too, may secure American employment in Mexico.

Despite the considerable risk illegal immigrants face in returning across the border, many find the lure of large U.S. factory salaries hard to resist—at 15 percent of the pay of corresponding jobs in America, these positions pay three times what Mexican jobs do.

Still, the danger is very real. When 31-year-old illegal Arizona resident Ignacio Jimenez sought employment at an American plant in Mexico, he was shot at by Mexican border guards as he attempted to illegally enter the country of his citizenship, pursued by U.S. immigration officials who thought he might be entering the country illegally, and fired upon again by a second group of U.S. Border Patrol agents charged with keeping valuable table-busing and food-delivery personnel inside American borders.

"It was a nightmare," Jimenez said. "Many became disoriented and panicked, and some were mixed in with immigrants going the other way across the Rio Grande and ended up swimming to the wrong country."

He added: "My cousin almost drowned. They fished him out and sent him back to wash dishes at T.G.I. Friday's."

Many say the trip across the border as illegal Mexican-American emigrants offers them a chance to land the American jobs in Mexico they never have been able to get as illegal Mexican-American immigrants in the U.S.

"It has always been my goal to have a good American job," Johnson Controls technician Camilla Torres, 27, said. "Many Mexicans now see Mexico as the land of opportunity. Mexicans will not stop trying to get here, no matter how much the Mexicans wish we would not."

Indeed, the trend of illegal re-emigration is causing great resentment among the local Mexican population, and tension between Mexicans and illegally re-entered Mexicans—dubbed repatriados—continues to build.

"I hate these Mexicans, always coming back here to Mexico from America and taking American jobs from the Mexicans who stayed in Mexico," said 55-year-old former Goodyear factory manager Juan-Miguel Diaz, who lost his job to a better-trained repatriado last March. "Why don't they go back to where they went to?"

Still, Jimenez, Reyes, and hundreds of others say they have no choice.

"The American Dream is alive and well in Mexico," Reyes said. "If I work hard, save my money, and plan well, I will be able to send my children to a good school—and who knows? If they study hard, perhaps they will get jobs someday at the new plant General Motors is building in China."

NASA Announces Plan To Launch $700 Million Into Space

May 3, 2006 | Issue 42•18

CAPE CANAVERAL, FL—Officials at the Kennedy Space Center announced Tuesday that they have set Aug. 6 as the date for launching $700 million from the Denarius IV spacecraft, the largest and most expensive mission to date in NASA's unmanned monetary-ejection program.

 

"This is an exciting opportunity to study the effect of a hard-vacuum, zero-gravity environment on $50 and $100 bills," said NASA Administrator Michael Griffin, who noted that prior Project Denarius missions only studied space's effect on fives and singles. "Whether the money is immediately incinerated because of hard radiation, or freezes in the near-absolute-zero temperature and shatters into infinitesimal pieces, or drifts aimlessly through the cosmos before being sucked through a black hole into another dimension, it will provide crucial information for our next series of launches, which will consist of even greater sums of money, in larger denominations."

Denarius IV, the fourth in a series of unmanned monetary-dispersal probes, will leave Earth's atmosphere at 36,500 miles per hour—the highest velocity at which money has ever departed the planet.

Said Project Denarius lead scientist Dr. Lou Weaver: "The craft's time-release hatches, using cutting-edge ATM money-ejecting technology, will systematically discharge the currency at intervals of $50,000 every three seconds. Cameras on the craft's exterior will capture images of the bills as they majestically pirouette into the heavens, dotting the black void of space with elegant spirals of green." Until now, the image of money floating in space was available only through artists' renderings.

Far more ambitious in scope than the previous missions of $88 million, $110 million, and $375 million, Denarius IV is a two-stage spacecraft. Its solar probe, Croesus, will disengage from the main craft in October and release $12 million into the sun. The craft, with its remaining payload of $688 million, will travel across the solar system, reaching Jupiter by June 2007. Once there, it will eject the money from the cargo bay in what will be the largest single financial deployment in NASA history.

"This is just another step in our long-term goal to put $1 billion on Mars," Weaver added.

NASA is continuing to perform extensive endurance tests on portions of the $700 million, including acclimating it to extreme atmospheric pressure by deploying a sample stack of $200 million to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean; strengthening its resilience in high-temperature conditions by sealing it in airtight containers and lowering them into the lava flow of Hawaii's Mauna Loa; and replicating the high-acceleration environment of space travel by shooting bundles of dimes out of magnetic-rail accelerators at thousands of feet per second into giant axial fans.

Some in the private sector are attempting their own currency-expelling spaceflights, including Virgin CEO Richard Branson, whose Virgin Galactic plans to eject £2 million from the still-theoretical SpaceShipThree orbital aircraft. Yet Griffin felt confident that NASA is far ahead of its private counterparts and rival state-run space agencies, saying that Project Denarius will be the "jewel in the crown" of taxpayer-financed space exploration.

Although polls indicate that a majority of Americans support the NASA mission, some fear a repeat of 2003's Denarius III disaster, in which hundreds of thousands of dollars burned up in Earth's atmosphere when the ship exploded shortly after leaving the launchpad. Reports suggest that one of the craft's solid-gold money clips failed during liftoff.

NASA officials dismissed the risk, saying that, should the mission fail, the lost money could be replaced by any of the other stores of $700 million the agency has  in reserve, and that the mission could be re-launched as early as January 2007.