So?
If you can't pay your workers a living wage, you don't fucking deserve to exist as a company.
Cry more, capitalist.
this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2023
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“No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.” - FDR
And just in case there is any confusion, here's the next line:
By "business" I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living.
If he saw what modern minimum wage has become, he would be disgusted.
The republicans sure have a problem defining decency
Not really, they just define it the same as everything else they don’t like: decency is “woke”
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If they're paying dividends to shareholders, and fatcat salaries to CEO / upper board, whilst their workers need gov topups and assistance to survive... they can get fucked.
It never fails to amaze me that there's so much focus on 'benefit scroungers', whilst a majority of big businesses gain the giant benefit of cheap wages while their workers need gov assistance to get by. There are piggies with their snouts at the top, and they sit on the boards / are CEOs of big companies & multinationals.
It's the usual backwards conservative shit, much like their stance on illegal immigration. They demonize immigrants from Central America while largely conservative businesses are the ones who hire them and give them a reason to come here. So, as DeSantis found out, they don't actually want laws to stop it. Same with welfare, like you're saying... they act like people on public assistance are scum somehow, and like they want to decrease it, but then companies like Walmart are setup to benefit from it by being able to pay their workers less.
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For reference, hourly workers at Ford currently make $78K, and they rejected Ford's proposed increase to $92K.
Also for reference, about a decade ago during the last contract negotiation, workers forgoed pay raises in order to help these struggling companies bottom line with the promise that they'd get their raises in the future all while inflation hammered away at their stagnant pay. These workers are owed that money.
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Ford Motor Co.'s second-quarter profit more than tripled to $1.92 billion versus a year ago (source)
Revenue rose 12% to $44.95 billion
Kinda hard to drum up sympathy for the company when it's raking in almost $2 billion in profit per quarter. Yes, Ford is burning about $1billon per quarter on EVs right now. That's not something the workers should be financing. That's money the company is investing to be viable in the future. That sucks for the shareholders; but, they are the ones who will reap any benefits of that investment and they should be the ones eating the cost.
they are the ones who will reap any benefits of that investment and they should be the ones eating the cost.
They seem to have forgotten that "The investor takes the risk", sometimes its not all fst dividends.
Sounds like the executives should take a pay cut.
Realistically executive salaries probably won't cover a salary increase across the workforce foe the whole country. Not doing a stock buy back just might though.
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His salary in 2022 was 17.3 million and that’s down from 18.7 million in 2021. They could have paid 200 employees 85k a year instead of one pointless executive. So maybe the executives are the reason for the company going under.
That's just salary.
His other compensations, benefits, and free services like company jets and private dining, provide a very significant increase of their own.
C-level compensation is never merely in pay, there's a whole incredibly expensive ecosystem to support as well.
And, in addition to his surprising decision to pay himself more than his predecessor, he was a major stock holder before he took over the position, so he's getting dividends and stockholder equity as well.
Heyyyy, wait a minute.
Didn't he decide to do a stock buyback with company funds? 3.5 billion worth over the past decade? $400 million in the last year?
Weren't those things considered the kind of market manipulation that helped cause the Great Depression?
That sounds like $3.5B of equity that could be leveraged to develop new vehicles, build new factories, and pay employees a fair wage.
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First, let's talk about stock buybacks, government bailouts, pandemic assistance money, and record profits, all of which happened after workers accepted reduced pay and reduced benefits to help "make the company profitable again".
Remember folks, profits means money is being withheld from the workers.
Profit also means money isn't being used for future investment into the company. Funny, they weren't complaining about these lack of investments just a year or two ago when cars were getting marked up and selling $10k+ above MSRP.
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Y'know, he could always just AGREE TO THEIR TERMS! The company being at stake is the entire point of unionizing.
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Sounds like a bad business strategy is the real problem.
I mean if you can't afford to innovate and pay your staff a livable wage then you don't have a sound business model.
Ford spent almost $500 million on stock buybacks in 2022. GM spent around $3 billion. Maybe priorities needs to be adjusted.
"This strike is preventing my company from having a future"
Umm. Yes. Yes it is. That's the entire point you complete idiot.
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Isn't it he who has the power to end the strike?
And probably the one with millions in bonuses at the end of the strike.
Sounds like Bill needs to pull himself up by his bootstraps.
But what about all the work his grest grandfather did to build the company? Shouldn't he be entitled to live large off that man's work by virtue of his birthright?
So what if these workers who actually build the product that Ford sells can't afford food or shelter. This man struggled to be born into the correct family, and he's entitled to his fortune!
Oh boohoo Bill.
But he also said Ford is paying CEO Jim Farley $21 million per year when starting pay for Ford factory workers is up only about $3 per hour from when he started with the company 31 years ago.
Ford’s offer of a 23% general wage increase barely covers inflation over the last three or four years, said Applebee, 59.
Lmao, talk to any former ford employee and they'll probably show the middle finger to the entire board if they could.
They run the layoff cycle literally every other year to cut costs whenever sales even hint at slowing down, all while paying CEOs massive money.
"Yeah we moved to mexico less than our competitors so that makes us better"
Sounds to me like he has plenty of power to end the strike, he can see the concrete requirements from the workers. Grant them, in full, strike ends, company safe. Sounds simple Mr. 21 Million plus perks.
Ford does not give a shit if an employee dies. Sucks doesn't it?
They don't care if their customers, die either. Pretty sure they got caught doing a cost benefit analysis on fixing defective Pintos vs paying the wrongful death suits and deciding it was cheaper to let people keep dying.
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Well then Ford make a decision. Do you want a company or not, because you can absolutely remain profitable whilst paying your employees properly. Without employees to do the labor to make the products you sell you have nothing, so it seems like the best course of action would be to make sure the folks ensuring your business has product to sell should be properly motivated to continue to want to provide their time and labor. Their time is the same as the Csuite's time, you cannot get it back, so they deserve to get paid properly.
Ford C-suite took home $71 million in 2021 (most recent year I could find data). They could give each worker a $1000+ bonus and still walk away with $10 million. Not that $1000 is enough for each worker, but just to illustrate that there is a ton of money floating around, they just don't want the workers to have it. It's not future investment they're worried about (they get massive tax breaks for all these new facilities, and new car designs are all being done by salaried white collar engineers anyway), it's shareholder profits. Ford doesn't want to lower their reported annual profits by increasing their worker costs.
Fuck shareholders, and fuck the C-suite for looking out for their interests instead of their workers. They don't actually produce anything. The workers are the real company asset here, not some Wall Street goon who bought stock.
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Maybe you should make your workers whole then. Sounds like that’s a you problem not a union problem.
Ford should just get rid of their C-level executive team.
Decent ownership would sacrifice most of of their profits to see the company through difficult periods, as was done prior to the Jack Welch/Ronald Reagan corporate culture sociopathification half a century ago when the oligarchs decided to abandon any mutual respect for their workers and exploit everything away from their labor force, after sabotaging labor power legislatively of course.
That doesn't happen anymore though. Bill Ford will never encounter a moment of concern about how he'll afford groceries or a mortgage, regardless of the outcome of this strike. Fuck these capitalist manipulators, and fuck this country for bowing to the desires of the haves while ignoring the needs of the have nots.
Why should the laborers, America's paycheck to paycheck losers, care about the future of this exploitative country's ability to remain as it is, systematically fucking them over? Why would they want their children to be subject to this rigged system as it currently is?
If the laborers weren't propagandized from birth by the capitalists to believe this rigged economy to be the only way, they'd be actively burning this crooked place down to the ground.
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I bet plantation owners made similar speeches.
Then agree to every single one of their demands.
Saving companies from a striking workforce is incredibly easy.
Oh no! The grandson of one of Hitler’s largest US supporters might lose money. How awful. So sad. Fuck Ford.
Ford, GM, and Stellantis are lucky they even exist. The government should have let them collapse and did in 2008.
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