Ford Motor Company Is Making Record Profits – By Shipping Our Jobs Overseas
On Tuesday, Ford Motor Company reported a record breaking profit for the third quarter. Ford earned 1.7 billion dollars during the quarter, which was way up from a profit of $997 million a year ago during the same time period. Ford CEO Alan Mulally is being hailed as a miracle worker, and investors are giddy about the future of the company. So is all of this success by Ford translating into good jobs for American workers? No. As described in a recent article on MSNBC, Mulally has been "revamping Ford’s U.S. and global manufacturing operation to be cheaper, more efficient and more flexible". In other words, Mulally has been getting rid of American workers in droves. Since Mulally took over as CEO, Ford has slashed its North American work force by nearly half. Ford has shut down or plans to shut down a dozen U.S. manufacturing facilities. Today, only about 40 percent of Ford's 178,000 workers are employed in North America, and a lot of those jobs are in Canada and Mexico. In fact, the number of Ford cars produced in Mexico continues to grow rapidly. The truth is that this is yet another example that proves that what is good for Wall Street is not necessarily good for average American workers.
Today, the average Mexican auto worker makes less than a tenth of what a U.S. auto worker makes in total compensation. In the new global economy, good jobs are going to where the labor is the cheapest, and that means going away from American workers.
Even the unionized workers that remained at the manufacturing facilities that Ford kept open were forced to agree to very substantial concessions to their labor contracts just to keep their jobs.
Meanwhile, literally hundreds of Ford dealerships have been shut down from coast to coast. All of this "dealership downsizing" has also come at a very high price - thousands of good American jobs.
So should we be celebrating record profits at Ford?
Not really.
The truth is that in the pursuit of profits, Ford has devastated quite a few local communities.
Link:
http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/ford-motor-company-is-making-record-profits-by-shipping-our-jobs-overseas
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