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

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

#91

Post by pengaru »

freedomben wrote: post #15
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 th…

Company hopping is a response to a lack of commitment to employees' security and future from employers and disappearance of anything resembling a pension.

People don't walk away from handcuffs made of any remotely precious metal, employers have every ability to disincentivize that behavior.

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

#92

Post by makingstuffs »

bilekas wrote: post #56
watwut wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not even that. Plenty dont have a choice and participate in rackets. It is not like they were swimming in money and riches But some places are worst then rackets the town nearby.

> Plenty dont have a choice and participate in rackets I do appreciate that, but seems to me that the path towards change (CEO epiphanies) is for as many people as possible boycott the job.. It's a mentality change and I'm glad to see GenZ and others pushing to change it.

The problem is that there is a vast number of people in modern societies whom do not come from a stable background.

Something I have realised since managing to work my family out of the trenches is that the majority of people really do not have any idea on just how bad things can be. And I should add it is not their fault in the slightest. If you’re not living amongst it the articles you read in mainstream media seem like rare anomalies but the reality is that they are not.

The biggest benefit to having a stable background is the ability to be more selective about the job you take as you know there is a safety net.

When you are literally living paycheque to paycheque you don’t even want to risk having to complete another round of probation in a better job as you run the risk of being unemployed in three months time and loss of one month’s salary can start a spiral which makes your currently manageable situation a lot less so.

I say this from personal experience as someone in the UK, I can’t speak for anywhere else.

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

#93

Post by rurp »

SecretDreams wrote: post #60
bilekas wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, Ge…

> It's ridiculous, GenZ has just realized they don't want to participate in the racket and I don't blame them. It's not that they don't want to participate in the racket, it's that the racket literally can not sustain them. Older gens participate in the racket because most of them locked in housing or rents from an era where the racket could support those prices. Gen Z has much higher housing costs that make "the rac…

Wait, how many people have rents locked in from a previous era? The vast majority of rental agreements I'm aware of renew every year or so and the landlord is free to charge market rate at that point. Older generations get hit with high rent the same as Gen Z.

No argument on housing prices. It's crazy how high they are in a lot of cities relative to the median salary.

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

#94

Post by happymellon »

greymalik wrote: post #48
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.

I agree with that, but isn’t it also the case that if an employer raises wages enough to get the workers they need, they have to do some combination of passing those costs along to customers and reducing the benefits to shareholders, which in turn reduces their ability to remain a viable business and keep people employed? It’s a balancing act.

If their business relies on other people doing, what reads to me as charity work then perhaps their business isn't viable.

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

#95

Post by nerdsniper »

bigyabai wrote: post #81
nerdsniper wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fairness, homes in Detroit can be quite affordable. There are quite a few 2,000 sq. ft. homes listed for Good school districts are likely to be less affordable though, but cost of raising children is a whole other can of worms.

I think the parent's point is more that there are so few of those workers that you need seniority for any job security in the first place. The 22-year-olds are the first people getting fired in a scheme like this, and there's not exactly a burgeoning demand for their replacement.

The UAW-Ford contract doesn't allow that, the 1-2 year employees would be fired before the 22 year old employees with 4 years of seniority. We're specifically talking about union jobs (UAW), so the company isn't generally targeting specific workers to fire.

The union has a lot of control over which employees leave during layoffs, and often it's actually the workers with less seniority in the union who are let go. Generally unions negotiate for a "last hired, first fired" situation (youngest employees go first) and often more senior employees have "bumping rights" - if their entire specialization is eliminated, they can move laterally by displacing junior workers. It's also fairly difficult for Ford to individually target the most expensive workers because the UAW does a good job of making sure there's real cause for termination.

UAW's agreement with Ford contains the usual "last hired, first fired" provision on page 80 here[0] in Article VIII §16(c). "Bumping" is part of the agreement on page 79, VIII §13(b).

Perhaps I misunderstood you and you meant that it's hard for workers to get to the "4 year" mark in the first place because Ford can just churn the 1-3 year workers over and over again. The UAW contract also contains a "Preferential Placement Arrangements" clause which gives laid-off workers priority for re-hire whenever Ford is hiring again. Workers can lose their seniority - but there's a bit of a ratchet effect, they have to stay unemployed by Ford for a length of time equal to how long they were employed. So if they've worked there for 2 years, get fired, and are next in line to be rehired 18 months later, they'll enter back in with 3.5 years of seniority from their original date of hire.

Ford had no WARN layoffs[1] between 2012-2018 and only 3 in the past 6 years (affecting 4200 workers in total), so generally it seems that workers are able to achieve top-end wages and full seniority before being laid off.

0: https://uaw.org/2023fordcontract/vol-1/#p=80

1: https://www.warntracker.com/company/ford-motor-company

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

#96

Post by tzs »

otikik wrote: post #39
nerdsniper wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hypothetically, we could look at reality instead of looking at hypotheticals.

The hypothetical he is describing has actually been reality in the past, such as in the US during much of WW II.

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

#97

Post by jandrese »

rurp wrote: post #93
SecretDreams wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's ridiculous, GenZ has just realized they don't want to participate in the racket and I don't blame them. It's not that they don't want to participate in the racket, it's that the racket literally can not sustain them. Older gens participate in the racket because most of them locked in housing or rents from an era where the racket could support those prices. Gen Z has much higher housing costs that make "the rac…

Wait, how many people have rents locked in from a previous era? The vast majority of rental agreements I'm aware of renew every year or so and the landlord is free to charge market rate at that point. Older generations get hit with high rent the same as Gen Z. No argument on housing prices. It's crazy how high they are in a lot of cities relative to the median salary.

Rent controls exist, although they're mostly a legacy thing now.

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

#98

Post by kotaKat »

josefresco wrote: post #78
kotaKat wrote: post #6

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

Ford Maverick starts at around $27K. It's not a sedan but it's not $50K.

Yeah, and it was a $19k truck with a hybrid, and now it’s $29k with the I4.

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

#99

Post by potato3732842 »

nerdsniper wrote: post #85
ramesh31 wrote: post #42

Just tell them to go live in a van down by the River Rouge, Mr. Farley.

It's interesting that myself, and a non-insignificant number of other people, would take an option like this if it were legal. It would certainly make vacations much more affordable to be able to bring my home with me and not pay for an AirBNB/hotel + rental car/ubers! However, to someone for whom rent is an onerous expense, vans and box trucks are prohibitively expensive, especially when you consider 10 year TCO.

>It's interesting that myself, and a non-insignificant number of other people, would take an option like this if it were legal.

Pretty much everything that makes housing/living unaffordable is a result of intentional regulatory decisions between about 1960 and 2000 (with the biggest exception I can think of being the coopting of the IBC by various product manufactures, that picked up in the 2010s and beyond).

You can't live in a van or other mobile thing because zoning. You can't build a non-mobile thing by the river because wetlands. And even if you could the thing you want to build can't be build because the rules and the codes are riddled with carve outs to make work for well lobbied industries.

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

#100

Post by djohnston »

constantcrying wrote: post #22

It is ridiculous to have American workers and Chinese workers doing essentially the same job, at the same quality, while their salaries differ enormously. American (and European) automotive companies will never be able to compete long term in any market which allows competition between Chinese and American (or European) cars. The labor of an auto worker is not worth that much and only by banning competition can Ameri…

Eh... "ridiculous" is a matter of perspective. If you're running a country and you want your people to be well-compensated and live meaningful lives, shuffling the hand in their favour is not violating some physical law. Countries restrain naked competition all the time to benefit their people.

To me it seems much more ridiculous to expect Western citizens to accept a degradation in living standards for the abstract notion of some universal economic efficiency. Though you can easily argue we're headed that way, it's mostly because of government capture by multinational corps.

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