FCA Racketeering Lawsuit Ruling

So now is the ideal time to reconnect with your top talent if you want to retain them. Post-COVID, your disengaged employees will start looking for a better deal elsewhere. Will the return to normal tempt your best people to pursue other options?

The best thing to do is to step up employee engagement and keep everyone in the fold. Turnover can seriously impede a body shop, and poaching can spread quickly. Joe Technician is happy at his new shop and the word is out they’re looking for more people, so a strong bond with your employees is more important now than ever.

Focus on retaining your female employees, because they are the most likely to switch or quit altogether. According to NPR, 865,000 women left the U.S. workforce— four times more than men—in just September last year.

“The coronavirus pandemic is wreaking havoc on households, and women are bearing the brunt of it,” the NPR study said. “Not only have they lost the most jobs from the beginning of the pandemic, but they are exhausted from the demands of childcare and housework---and many are now seeing no path ahead but to quit working.

Keep Millennials in your discussions. They’re focused on things such as diversity and inclusion, so keep them in the loop. The worst thing is to have them feeling like they’re not being heard. Let them play a role and watch them excel as people and leaders. To accommodate your younger crew members, keep your meetings short and sweet and create mechanisms to enable them to contribute.

It’s a whole new game out there and those shops that can adapt will succeed, while others might encounter a never-ending carousel of new and returning employees.

The pandemic changed the rules, but many principles of employee communication are still the same. Try to keep stress levels low, keep your eyes open for changes within your team and proceed carefully, and you will be able to retain your people and avoid the pitfalls of the Great Resignation.

by Brad Anderson, CarScoops

An appeals court in the U.S. has upheld a 2020 ruling tossing out the racketeering lawsuit that General Motors filed against Fiat Chrysler Automobiles. General Motors filed the racketeering lawsuit against FCA in November 2019. It claimed its rival had bribed United Auto Workers (UAW) union officials to corrupt labor talks to its advantage. GM claimed this cost it billions of dollars.

While GM has long believed it had a strong case, a federal judge in mid-2020 ordered General Motors CEO Mary Barra and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles CEO Mike Manley to meet and resolve the lawsuit. The judge noted there were more urgent issues facing the U.S. and the lawsuit was a “waste of time and resources.”

GM tried multiple times to have the lawsuit reinstated but earlier in August, the three-judge panel of the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the attempt, Auto News reported.

“Even accepting GM’s theory as true, the chain of causation between FCA’s bribes and GM’s injury is still too attenuated,” the three-judge panel said in its ruling.

The lawsuit alleged FCA corrupted the contract bargaining process between GM and the UAW in an attempt to force a merger between the two car manufacturers. The lawsuit claimed late FCA CEO Sergio Marchionne was responsible for conceiving, executing and sponsoring the wrongdoing.

FCA had long called the lawsuit “meritless” and said GM’s recently amended complaint was “full of preposterous allegations.”

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