Well…hey, look at that…I’m not going to talk about trump today and I’m sure you are as relieved as I am…but, I am going to talk about something that has been puzzling me all week after Ford’s bonds were downgraded to junk status…what genius thought that Jim Hackett had the talent to be the solution for Ford’s problems? Let’s go back a ways to his tenure at Steelcase, a company that WAS the world’s largest furniture manufacturer until Hackett got done with it and bailed into “retirement”…we had a saying when I worked at Steelcase…that a monkey could cut jobs and outsource production…but that is Hackett’s only claim to fame there…taking over a company with over 11,000 employees and 9 manufacturing plants with good paying jobs…and turning that into a company with less than 3,000 employees and no manufacturing left in the US after outsourcing everything to plants in Mexico. No innovation, no understanding of the talent the company had, and no growth…and now he has done the same thing to Ford…and all they would have had to do is drive 150 miles or so over to this side of the state and they would see what a no talent hack he is…but I guess that doesn’t matter in the insular world of the 1% where the norm is to fail up and pay no consequences for stupidity or the lack of talent. I have been a Ford man my entire life and I feel for them for getting snowed by Hackett and putting the company in danger…maybe this is what it takes to break the cycle of the incestuous relationships that lead to the same few people getting chance after chance even after being an abject failure….geez….
Tag Archives: Ford
The idiot trump is killing Ford…
Well…I really do hate to gloat when people are losing their jobs, okay…maybe it’s not gloating but just pointing out how badly the idiot trump sucks when trade is involved…every economist in the world has said that trump’s tariffs are just the most stupid thing he could have done, and that they would cost hundreds of thousands of jobs and billions in corporate profits…and now those projections are coming true with the announcement from Ford that the tariffs have already cost them over a billion dollars in profit just in the 6 months since the tariffs were imposed, and today Ford announced that they are going to cut 24,000 jobs that are also a direct result of the tariffs…so now, how’s that MAGA bullshit working out for you Ford workers that voted for trump? This is just the first round of damage that has been done by trump and his idiot minions and it won’t be the last….Ford is warning that, unless the tariffs are rescinded, more and more cuts are going to happen that could imperil the company’s viability going forward…and if Ford fails, that’s over 350,000 jobs gone…350,000 good jobs that pay enough to live on…but that has been the repubs plan all along…they can’t have regular working people making enough money to live on…that means taking money away from the 1% and that is just not acceptable…impeach…
Music in advertising…
Well…I have talked to Tom about this before but I had to get it down here since it is something that I am a little amazed about…and that is the use of certain kind of songs in advertising….the first time this struck me was a Ford ad that used a Deep Purple song “‘On the highway stoned”…now I wonder if anyone listened to that before the made the ad…and they even left the lyrics in that one that you could hear plainly playing as the cars were driving across the screen…probably not the message that they wanted to convey. Then, I just heard a shoe company using “Who are you?” by the Who which is about a drunken night where the lyrics talk about passing out in a Soho doorway and getting in a drunken brawl….and now I will always connect drinking with that shoe company….and the last one that just came on is the use of the Who’s “Eminence Front” as the background for a GMC commercial when the song is about how people are getting screwed and used by the institutions and people that they believed in…maybe that one is appropo for GM…not sure….geez…
If Ford can do it, why can’t the rest?
Well…have been thinking about this since Ford reported it’s quarterly profits in the last week or so, making it almost 6.5 billion dollars in profit through the third quarter; eclipsing all of the other automakers combined. And, guess what? They did it with union organized plants that pay a wage that keeps their workers solidly in the middle class. Take that you right wing union bashers….you that have done your best to destroy organized labor here in the US….saying that the only reason the automakers can’t or haven’t made money is the overpaid, lazy union workforce. But the question that immediately comes to my mind is: if Ford can do it, why can’t the rest? Why is it necessary for GM and Chrysler to have a two tiered wage scale that pays new workers half of what their old ones make? What is different that they can’t do what Ford does, especially when they have come through bankruptcy with little of the debt that Ford carries? I don’t think there is a difference other than, with the bad economic times, GM and Chrysler are still hanging on to the adversarial labor relationship that existed before the downturn and their management just doesn’t get that their workers are not the problem. But, with the return of the know nothing repubs…that is all we have to look forward to….they are going to keep their feet on the necks of the middle class as long as America stays so damn stupid and keeps electing them….
One other observation that just popped into my head…why are police and firefighters unions okay, but teachers and industrial unions are constant targets of the repubs. I’ve never heard them say one word about the police unions in any of the big cities that have them…so, again, if unions are so bad, why are police and firefighters given a pass by the repubs? Just asking….
Let’s stop blaming the unions…
Well…I hope the latest profit numbers from Ford will blow up the repubs tired old arguments that everything that is wrong with American industry can be traced back to the supposed greed of the union represented workers that are the backbone of the auto industry. 3.1 billion dollars in profit…yep, that’s right…so far this year Ford has made 3.1 billion dollars on it’s North American car business…a completely unionized manufacturing company with fairly paid workers sharing in the success but also giving back when the company was in trouble. How did they do it? I know, the repubs will point to the pay and benefits of the unions as the reason that GM and Chrysler filed for bankruptcy…but let’s look at it closer..it was just bad management from the top down at those companies….and a failure to look farther into the future than the next quarterly statement. Plus, they just made cars and trucks that no one wanted and were of lower quality than their competitors.
Unlike their competitors, the Ford family recognized that things were changing in the industry a few years before the bottom fell out and and also recognized that a different kind of management was needed for the coming downturn. But, they also recognized that new, better products were needed as well and embarked on programs to make better cars that the public wanted. Personally, I think the right moves were made, to a large part, because the family’s name was still on the side of the building, and there was pride that all of the workers, salaried and union shared. It’s that dynamic that the repubs don’t care about…that there can be successful companies where both labor and ownership are successful; and the Ford family recognizes that without their skilled and dedicated union workers, their success would not be assured if the only labor plan was to bash the unions and take all they can with no regard for their workers. But, the repubs only know that labor is their mortal enemy, to be crushed at all costs….geez…