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Ford CEO on his ‘epiphany’ after talking to factory workers in 2023

finance.yahoo.com

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Re: Ford CEO on his ‘epiphany’ after talking to factory workers in 2023

#11

Post by nerdsniper »

techdmn wrote: post #7

Seems like a good time to mention my old stand-by: There is no such thing as a labor shortage. There may very well be a shortage of qualified people willing to work under the conditions and for the compensation a company would like to provide. When stated that way you can see that there are several levers to pull, the most obvious being compensation.

99% of the time, I agree with you.

But hypothetically, what would you call a situation where 20 companies would all be willing to pay salaries of $1 million/year to fill 10,000 open positions that required 5 years of training, but there are only 5,000 people who have that training? Would that be a "labor shortage"?

It seems your solution works for companies willing to pay more to poach from other companies, but might not work in situations where all of them need more skilled labor now.

Also, the $1M/year illustrates a point...why not $10 million or $100 million/year? At some point, the salaries are indeed "high enough" but the skills still just aren't available to hire.

Re: Ford CEO on his ‘epiphany’ after talking to factory workers in 2023

#12

Post by skeeter2020 »

techdmn wrote: post #7

Seems like a good time to mention my old stand-by: There is no such thing as a labor shortage. There may very well be a shortage of qualified people willing to work under the conditions and for the compensation a company would like to provide. When stated that way you can see that there are several levers to pull, the most obvious being compensation.

your old stand-by doesn't make any sense "there is no such thing as a labour shortage" is totally represented by a shortage of qualified people for the given compensation. This is the basis of every economics supply & demand graph, where explicitly refer to the misalignment as a surplus or shortage.

Re: Ford CEO on his ‘epiphany’ after talking to factory workers in 2023

#13

Post by [deleted] »

techdmn wrote: post #7

Seems like a good time to mention my old stand-by: There is no such thing as a labor shortage. There may very well be a shortage of qualified people willing to work under the conditions and for the compensation a company would like to provide. When stated that way you can see that there are several levers to pull, the most obvious being compensation.

[deleted]

Re: Ford CEO on his ‘epiphany’ after talking to factory workers in 2023

#14

Post by 1970-01-01 »

Finally, someone at the top realizing how unrealistic new career paths are. They must have a solid step on a career ladder. This includes the daily cashflow to stick with it and actually make it to that 2nd step. If you continue to jerk them around with minimum wage jobs, everyone will regret it.

Re: Ford CEO on his ‘epiphany’ after talking to factory workers in 2023

#15

Post by freedomben »

colechristensen wrote: post #2

That Ford CEO is stupid. There's no "shortage" of workers. Corporations are expecting other people to train their employees past entry level and pay these people with midlevel experience like badly paid unskilled laborers. Nobody is investing years of their time and large sums of money to get trained up for a shitty job? SURPRISE SURPRISE If you won't take an average person with no knowledge of your industry and trai…

I don't disagree, but I do think the modern culture of company hopping is contributing to this. As a leader entrusted to make good decisions for the company, you must consider this reality.

At a previous company we hired a lot of junior engineers with the idea that our relatively high pay and reasonably good work would help us build a strong generation of seniors a few years down the road. What we mostly found was that we spent a ton of money and our sr eng time training and sharpening them, only for the vast majority of them to leave after 1 to 3 years. As I've gotten more into hiring, it's not at all surprising to me now as this is just clearly in the culture.

To be clear I'm not blaming the employees, in fact I blame ridiculously stupid HR practices for the last 20 years because they built a structure in which the only way to get a raise was to leave the company, and that was also often the best way to get promoted too.

Re: Ford CEO on his ‘epiphany’ after talking to factory workers in 2023

#16

Post by sieep »

bilekas wrote: post #9

> But beyond that, he began looking at the labor shortage in trade work, starting with technicians. It's amazing how there can be labour shortages, yet companies still don't pay people a living wage. I thought the market was supposed to be all based around supply and demand. This just shows how out of touch these CEO's are. They should work a year on the lowest salaried employee of their company for a while.

The market will follow supply and demand at its equilibrium, which clearly we are not at. The question is: what is preventing it from reaching that point?

Re: Ford CEO on his ‘epiphany’ after talking to factory workers in 2023

#17

Post by RankingMember »

kotaKat wrote: post #6

Now imagine if you could make affordable sedans again, Jim. How does Gen Z afford a $50,000 electric SUV?

Unfortunately sedans and hatches are just about completely out for the domestic automakers- they sold poorly and were discontinued. The reasons behind poor sales are surely multi-faceted, but, for Ford in particular, they didn't help matters with quality issues like the "Powershift" dual-clutch automatic, which was flawed from the beginning and left a lot of Focus and Fiesta owners (both now discontinued in the US) with a bad taste in their mouth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_PowerShift_transmission

Re: Ford CEO on his ‘epiphany’ after talking to factory workers in 2023

#18

Post by bilekas »

techdmn wrote: post #7

Seems like a good time to mention my old stand-by: There is no such thing as a labor shortage. There may very well be a shortage of qualified people willing to work under the conditions and for the compensation a company would like to provide. When stated that way you can see that there are several levers to pull, the most obvious being compensation.

> There is no such thing as a labor shortage.

Of course there isn't. This is out of touch employers saying "Nobody wants to work for $1 an hour, so must mean there's a shortage."

It's wild, that same in the service industry, restaraunts for example paying 1/2 dollars an hour and then putting the onus onto the customers to pay in tips.

https://www.businessinsider.com/what-its-like-to-work-at-waf...

It's ridiculous, GenZ has just realized they don't want to participate in the racket and I don't blame them.

Re: Ford CEO on his ‘epiphany’ after talking to factory workers in 2023

#19

Post by 1970-01-01 »

kotaKat wrote: post #6

Now imagine if you could make affordable sedans again, Jim. How does Gen Z afford a $50,000 electric SUV?

Nobody is buying new electric SUVs and saying the words "it was in my affordable range" They buy it used when its half-priced or lower, around $25k, or lease it.

Re: Ford CEO on his ‘epiphany’ after talking to factory workers in 2023

#20

Post by phtrivier »

wyldfire wrote: post #4

This epiphany is really just manifestation of many things like gasoline-on-fire stock buybacks [1] [2]. [1] https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ [2] https://digitalcommons.pace.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...

From [1]

> The growing wedge between productivity and typical workers’ pay is income going everywhere but the paychecks of the bottom 80% of workers. If it didn’t end up in paychecks of typical workers, where did all the income growth implied by the rising productivity line go? Two places, basically. It went into the salaries of highly paid corporate and professional employees. And it went into higher profits (returns to shareholders and other wealth owners). This concentration of wage income at the top (growing wage inequality) and the shift of income from labor overall and toward capital owners (the loss in labor’s share of income) are two of the key drivers of economic inequality overall since the late 1970s.

This part:

> returns to shareholders and other wealth owners

My understanding is that "other wealth owners" include... pensioners (through pension funds), is that correct ?

Beside the sheer greed of shareholders, how much does the curve boil down to "companies have to use revenues to pay current workers and previous workers, and we make new 'previous workers' every year" ?

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