Are Depression-era schedules returning to Chrysler?

This kind of story just scares me to death:

Chrysler plans to halt virtually all operations for two weeks in July as part of its effort to cut costs and return to profitability.

Summer shutdowns are longstanding traditions in the auto industry so plants can be retooled for the new model year, but they primarily involve only hourly workers. Chrysler told its salaried employees Thursday that, except for those who keep working in “business-critical activities,” they must use vacation time during the shutdown.

In past years, Chrysler has staggered its shutdowns throughout the summer. This will be the first shutdown since Chrysler became a private company, under the equity firm Cerberus Capital Management. The company, which is the fourth-largest seller of vehicles in the United States behind the other Detroit carmakers and Toyota, has about 70,000 employees.

“As a private company, we all need to think like owners and do our part to accelerate Chrysler’s recovery and transformation,” Chrysler’s chief executive, Robert L. Nardelli, told employees in an e-mail message.

The reason this scares me to death is that it reminds me way too much of the great Depression. I’ve noticed that most textbooks that cover the Depression tend to stress the number of unemployed there were at any given time. They never mention the number of under-employed. Over on our Wal-Mart blog, I often stress that Wal-Mart defines someone who works as few as 34 hours/week is considered full time by that company. [Of course, part-time workers get even fewer hours than that.] But you can’t shut-down a Wal-Mart.

You can and do, however, shut down a factory when you have too much inventory. This happened all teh time during the Depression. Even before the Depression, the tendency in factories was to take orders and run full, then shut down for extended periods of time to save on costs. Employers would know their old employees would be available when they started up again because they never had anywhere else to go.

The fact that Chrysler used to spread out the lay-offs, but now wants to force them all at the same time suggests to me that 1) They’re so desperate that they don’t care about employee morale and 2) They expect they’re employees to be waiting for them when their factories go back on line too.

If they still can’t sell cars, look for longer shut-downs in the future. And if this practice starts spreading to other industries, look for longer lines at soup kitchens everywhere.