Quote :

"DEARBORN, Mich. - Ford Motor Co., the nation's second-largest automaker, said Monday that it will cut 25,000 to 30,000 jobs and idle 14 facilities by 2012 as part of a restructuring designed to reverse a $1.6 billion loss last year in its North American operations. The cuts represent 20 percent to 25 percent of Ford's North American work force of 122,000 people. Ford has approximately 87,000 hourly workers and 35,000 salaried workers in the region. Plants to be idled through 2008 include the St. Louis, Atlanta and Michigan's Wixom assembly plants and Batavia Transmission in Ohio. Windsor Casting in Ontario also will be idled, as was previously announced following contract negotiations with the Canadian Auto Workers. Another two assembly plants to be idled will be determined later this year, the company said. The other seven facilities that will be idled were not immediately identified. A total of 14 facilities, including seven assembly plants, will cease production by 2012, Ford said. "We will be making painful sacrifices to protect Ford's heritage and secure our future," Chairman and Chief Executive Bill Ford said in a statement. "Going forward, we will be able to deliver more innovative products, better returns for our shareholders and stability in the communities where we operate." Ford also said it would no longer provide earnings guidance beginning in 2006."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060123/ap_on_bi_ge/ford_restructuring


DEY TUKK UR JABBS

1/23/2006 11:21:52 AM

Yea, this sucks pretty badly. Watch for falling Ford prices.

But the reason for this is that Ford and Chevy have not been able to keep up with the advances of Japanese vehicles. Daimler-Chrysler took the note and came out with their own sets of advances that keeps their cars selling. Unfortunatley for Ford and Chevy, they haven't.

I'm going to go buy an F-150 in the next month though.

1/23/2006 11:49:19 AM

COMING UP ON THE OUTSIDE IS CHINA, AND LOOKIT THEM MOVING UP FAST

1/23/2006 1:13:48 PM

Watch for falling Ford prices stocks.

1/23/2006 1:14:25 PM

shitty cars no wonder

1/23/2006 3:43:00 PM

everyone knows that what is really hurting american automakers is the fucking autoworkers union, and the members of that union need to realize this very fast if they want to keep their jobs. japanese companies don't have to pay the same rediculous benefits to a damn assembly line worker.

1/23/2006 6:14:45 PM

i'd say that shitty cars are also hurting ford.

1/23/2006 6:29:10 PM

i'd say that shitty cars are also hurting ford.

1/23/2006 6:30:01 PM

Quote :

"abonorio: But the reason for this is that Ford and Chevy have not been able to keep up with the advances of Japanese vehicles."

Insanely huge pension obligations don't exactly help either...

1/23/2006 6:30:58 PM

I hope the UAW is happy now. Good luck telling 30,000 workers that they are losing their jobs all because of management.

Not to say that management doesn't share in the blame, but the union is bankrupting Ford and GM with its ridiculous demands.

1/23/2006 6:35:54 PM

they should ban unions

you know thats what youre thinking

1/23/2006 6:37:54 PM

aha

They do have a little bit too much clout nowadays. Especially the public sector unions with their insane lobbying power.

But thats more the fault of the lobbying system than anything else. I'd like to see unions regulated so that members can opt out of political donations easily.

[Edited on January 23, 2006 at 6:44 PM. Reason : 2]

1/23/2006 6:42:18 PM

From a cnn article:

Quote :

"Declining market share Ford has seen U.S. auto sales fall each of the last six years, and its overall U.S. sales are now down more than 1 million vehicles, or 26.6 percent, since 1999. In 2005 alone, Ford's sales fell nearly 5 percent to less than 18 percent of the market, the 11th straight year it has lost share. It's had about 25 percent of U.S. sales as recently as 1998. Bill Ford told analysts hearing the details of the restructuring plan that the company would no longer give annual earnings targets or guidance, saying that was needed to change the company's focus from the short term to the long term. "We can not succeed in the long run if we're only focused on the short term," said Ford. But Fields, a key architect of the turnaround plan, did pledge to analysts that the company would return North American automotive operations to profitability by 2008, and to stabilize U.S. market share at current levels. Fields repeated his previous statement that the company needed to "change or die." "I thought that was an appropriate phase," said David Cole, chairman of the Center for Automotive Research. "They have to change pretty substantially." Cole said that plans by Ford executives to have quicker vehicle design and more flexible manufacturing plants are as important as the amount of capacity that is closed. "If they're successful at getting leaner and more flexible as they talk about, it gives them ability to adapt to the market," said Cole."

http://money.cnn.com/2006/01/23/news/companies/ford_closings/index.htm?cnn=yes

[Edited on January 23, 2006 at 6:46 PM. Reason : added link]

1/23/2006 6:45:25 PM

no

we need chinese level wages

thatll bring down your prices and we'll all be happy!

1/23/2006 6:45:53 PM

With Chinese level wages comes Chinese level productivity. We can get 10x that with trained American workers at the advanced plants they work in.

Unfortunately for Ford, they are payed like 100x more than the Chinese.

1/23/2006 6:49:57 PM

nm

we're an advanced nation. we should be paying 100x chinese wages. the chinese system is productive but brutal. id hope we were better than that.

[Edited on January 23, 2006 at 6:53 PM. Reason : .]

1/23/2006 6:52:03 PM

Ford and Chevy have improved generously in terms of actual quality, but their perceived quality is still horrible compared to asian makes.

1/23/2006 7:15:53 PM

The thing I heard on the radio today say that the average assembly line worker in a Ford plant takes in about $100,000 / year in wages and benefits (with average wages of $27/hr).

Also, they will receive roughly 90% of their pay until the end of 2007, without working, due to the terms in their contract. If a single one of these bastards complains about having to get 2 years paid vacation, I'm going to run him over with my Camry.

1/23/2006 7:28:44 PM

Well, the layoffs wouldn't be as severe as they are if not for the unions. Where-as ford should have been shedding workers regularly, by eliminating a shift or two, the unions have left ford with perverse options: Close the entire factory or keep every-single worker on.

// from another thread

1/23/2006 7:41:36 PM

question... what would be the possibility of a law saying that if a company builds a factory in a right-to-work state they do'nt have to honor union agreements from union-required states...

instant boom to the nc economy

[Edited on January 23, 2006 at 7:45 PM. Reason : no, i do'nt know a thing about economics, but my soc. prof. was enough to make me dislike unions]

1/23/2006 7:44:40 PM

I mean, to me, unions can at times be necessary, but for fuck's sake, if a guy on an assembly line makes more than either of my parents who have graduate degrees and get two full years of paid leave after a layoff, that's just ridiculous. I think every person who is willing and able to work deserves a living wage, but this shit is bananas.

1/23/2006 8:14:38 PM

Quote :

"COMING UP ON THE OUTSIDE IS CHINA, AND LOOKIT THEM MOVING UP FAST "

have you seen the new chinese car thats due for sale in the US this year? sells for under $10,000? i think thats what they were aiming for. looks pretty phat too for a cheap beater

1/23/2006 10:35:48 PM

that is about 25,000 to 30,000 people that wont be buying fords in the future

1/23/2006 10:38:42 PM

^ a used ford might become all they can afford.

1/23/2006 10:48:10 PM

Where's your living wage, now, Henry Ford? And your good cars?

1/23/2006 10:55:59 PM

I heard the same thing on the radio about the basically 2 year paid vacation time as a buffer zone, while offer retraining programs I believe. And in the long run this is supposed to help make ford more profitable. Granted they have some work to do to make themselves more appealing, but its best to get this kind of thing out of the way first so once they start rebuilding their image, they can keep it strong. Ford seems to have handled this responsibly from everything I've heard.

1/23/2006 11:06:13 PM

its unfortunate that the mob ruined the unions

a true tragedy

1/23/2006 11:06:41 PM

Quote :

"With Chinese level wages comes Chinese level productivity. We can get 10x that with trained American workers at the advanced plants they work in."

No, we can't. Our plants are crude and outdated compared to a lot of foreign plants in the industrialized world. You can thank this in large part the unions who resisted modernization to protect their jobs, only to end up killing productivity and thus getting the entire plant shipped off to the third world instead. Sure, we started catching up, but by the time we got it implimented, it was simply too late.

Quote :

"I mean, to me, unions can at times be necessary, but for fuck's sake, if a guy on an assembly line makes more than either of my parents who have graduate degrees and get two full years of paid leave after a layoff, that's just ridiculous. "

I second that. Outside of the issue of health care, their salaries are overinflated. I guess you can say that the unions were too successful to the point where they priced themselves out of a job...

1/24/2006 12:07:59 PM

Quote :

"Ford has seen U.S. auto sales fall each of the last six years, and its overall U.S. sales are now down more than 1 million vehicles, or 26.6 percent, since 1999."

It seems from this, that its mostly Ford's loss of sales that's killing them. Their sales drop almost 26.6%, and they lay off 25% of their workforce.

1/24/2006 12:41:42 PM

loss of sales comes from making crappy cars. making crappy cars comes from skimping on premium parts and having the cars fall apart. skimping on parts comes from having to pay workers too much.

obviously an oversimplification... but thats basically what has happened to them

1/24/2006 12:58:51 PM

its not about skimping on quality parts. its a lousy supply chain.

while the Japanese had implemented spectacular processes, continuously focused on improvements and setting the bar higher for quality, domestic makers were sticking to non-innovative processes and a preference for volume over quality.

ultimately they lost the volume battle for that very reason.

1/24/2006 1:44:10 PM

Its a lot more complex than that. They had four different, but interlinked problems:

1) The cars they made were shit and were not innovative. This is partly a management problem (don't go too outside the box, thats not what people want bullshit) and partly because they had to try to save all they can on their cars as they lost something in the order of $300+ a car while foreign automakers like Toyota make something like $1600+ per Camry they make.

2) The wages/pensions are costing them billions. GM and Chevy pay something in the order of 400-600/car that is sold into their employee retirement and healthcare benefits. That doesn't even include paying their fucking wages. This is what its interlinked with problem #1, they don't make shit on the cars. This was killing them, but the straw that broke the camels back was 3.

3)Ford and GM bouyed their losses on cars by the thousands they made on their SUV's and pickup trucks. This category has largely been American automakers dominant field, and they were making several thousand dollars a vehicle, whch covered the car losses. But when gas prices soared, demand for these tanked, and instantly Ford lost over 1.5 billion last quarter on making automobiles.

4) The loss in marketshare meant they were operating the current level of plants at an average of 79%, which is HORRENDOUS for an automaker. They are paying all these huges salaries to employees and maintainence on plants that can produce like over half a million cars a year more than they are currently doing at most plants (some like the Norfolk plant which turns out F-150s are still humming along, but the other plants were not) and their marketshare is only falling. If they had continued next year the efficiency would have been closer to 75%, so for every 4 cars those plants can turn out, they are only making 3. Thats completely unacceptable and they are throwing cash out the windows because of this.

Overall its interesting to note that the automotive industry is still hovering around 1 million+ employed in the US hourly. These cuts suck ass, but Nissan, Hyundai, and many of the other foreign automakers have moved much of their production over here, and the South is booming because of it. Detroit is no longer the home of automotive production, but the South is the new place to build cars. So while these and GMs layoffs are bad, it ends up being about a neutral shift with the other companies hiring up people just as fast as the Big Three can lay them off.

1/24/2006 6:10:07 PM

I have read many economists who were simply stumped as to why unemployment in the south was not lower and up north higher because of the regulatory (and union) differences between the two regions. Is the data now bearing this out, or would they still be stumped to find the expected results?

1/24/2006 10:55:25 PM

Its a slow process. Nissan is moving a very large facility from Los Angeles to Tennessee because of the favorable regulatory environment. Other foreign automakers are in the process of making similar moves.

Just when talking about the auto industry, there seems to be some political resistance to moving manufacturing from the big 3 out of the rust belt and into the south. Either that or simple resistance to change. Something is going on behind the scenes.

1/25/2006 12:12:38 AM

http://cgi.ebay.com/Dual-alarm-clock-Used-for-7-yrs-by-former-Ford-Engineer_W0QQitemZ4436787590QQcategoryZ79643QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

1/31/2006 3:37:06 PM