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Free PCs Not AfFordable
rakerman writes: "Ford Cancels Computer Giveaway Program. I guess their 'Model E' program turned out to be an Edsel." We did at least one story about this at the time (and a Katz essay). A lot of people pointed out that the United Auto Workers union was the driving force (ha-ha) behind this program initially.
You can read even more into this than Ford is saying. Not only is Ford making a statement that they can't afford to give PC's to their employees, they're also implying a couple of other things.
First, giving your staff free PC's isn't enough of a benefit to impress most of your staff. Let's face it, if you're working for a union-driven company like Ford, you're not living on Ramen Noodles, and you can probably afford any one of the dozens of el cheapo PC's being served up for the masses. Most of us would rather be given a credit at Best Buy to purchase the PC we really want, or maybe even peripherals if we already own a PC.
Second, in this economy, employee perks are the last thing from anybody's mind. Ford started this when employees were hard to find. Fast forward to today: due to massive layoffs everywhere, people are much easier to come by, and you don't have to go flashing perks in order to get people on board. Giving stuff away to your staff is an increasingly hard sell to the shareholders.
Third, the shareholders just got informed that they're getting decreased dividends for the first time that I can remember. Ford's always been a dividend-heavy company, and I'm sure it's hard for them to rationalize giving away PCs to their staff when their investors are getting less returns. Giveaways are associated with a dotcom, and typically the giveaways are cut just before the jobs are cut. Look out...
What's your damage, Heather?
And when everything is fully automated, exactly what do you propose we do with the hundreds of thousands of auto workers? make them all linux Programers?
A plain, un-informed anti-union rant gets +1 Informative? I see this as a troll. Though I may be feeding said troll, I couldn't let this slip by.
Sure, the reason Ford et. al. have all the automation they do is because of the high cost of labour. You think they'd buy a $3M robot to do a job if they could pay a person $5/Hr to do it? It wouldn't make sense, since the robot would likely cost $5M (price+maintenance) over it's useful lifetime of 5 years, and even paying the average person $5/Hr would cost Ford $350K for 35 years. So they would get 10 people for 7 times as long and still pay less money in the end. Oh, why $3M? Because there isn't a computer anywhere that can make decisions better than a human brain of any stature. Computers can crunch data easily, as long as the data is fairly constatnt - humand excell at dealing with dynamic data. It would take a major beowulf cluster to deal with all of the dynamics on an assembly line the way a single human being could deal with them.
Now, since people cost more than machines to use for a lot of the repeditive/boring/dangerous jobs, Ford uses machines for those jobs instead. It's a business - they use it if it contributes to the bottom line. Even the reason for most businesses keeping employees happy is not because of altruism, it's because happy workers are productive workers. Productive workers are cost-effective workers, and cost-effective = more profits.
As far as the price of vehicles go, it's not just Joe Sixpack turning bolts that's getting paid big $, you know - Ford does have a huge salaried contingent as well. All of thier employees contribute to overhead, not just the Unionised staff. I'd make a wild guess that if Union jobs were worth $5/hr, you'd only see the price of a car drop maybe $700.
IOW, it's not as simple as you make it sound, bub. Any economist (as long as they're not a big C conservative) will tell you the same thing - higher wages in one area lead to more jobs in other areas since the people getting more tend to spend more.
Unions have thier place even today (though I do wish they'd try to modernise some of thier attitude just a bit).
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
What would have been more sensible would have been to provide computer training (like say RedHat certification or something like that), which would actually help the employee progress in their career.
Simply giving them a PC was not a structured approach. My guess is that a lot of these PCs ended up being used for the kids to do their homework on, or more likely to play games.
Ford is right to think of innovative ways to increase computer literacy, but it looks like they didn't put enough thought into the 'Model E' project.
I think the proof is the simple fact that cars made in places such as Mexico, where the labour force is paid an iota of the price of the United States/Canadian auto labour force, cost just as much. VW, Chrysler, Ford : They've all opened plants there (many companies have opened plants based upon "low wages" and quickly pulled out after discovering that wages are only one small part of running a factory) and strangely I still see the price of cars rising and rising, yet at the same time the natural unemployment rate increases as an entire sector of workers is displaced. The idea that unions increase the cost of cars substantially is not based in any reality whatsoever.