Ford CEO on His ‘epiphany’ After Talking to Factory Workers in 2023

- "We'll train you, and if you stay the full 8 years you get a $500,000 bonus"?

- "Here's a $200,000 signing bonus, which you have to pay back if you leave before 8 years"

I'd be hesitant to rely on these as a candidate, because I'd have to assume I'd get fired at year 6-7 or something so that the company could save money.

Zero people are doing this for the fun of it. This is entirely driven by incentives, not "culture".

Or, rather, not by "culture" of the people doing the hopping—C-suite and MBA culture, yes, very much so, this is one of many bad outcomes from having companies run entirely by "professional managers" and finance dudes rather than people who were, at the start of their career, close to the actual productive work of the company, with the latter scenario once being far more common than it is now.

People don't walk away from handcuffs made of any remotely precious metal, employers have every ability to disincentivize that behavior.

I'm a programmer and have far less buying power than a Kmart cashier from the 70s had. I don't get a pension. They did.

There's no loyalty because we're all poor compared to every previous generation besides those literally living in log cabins.

Quality might have some small piece there, but there's other factors like:

- large trucks & SUVs are more profitable

- there's import restrictions on that category so it has a certain insulation from foreign competition

- US car companies are really just banks that happen to make cars -- "cash is king" was for our dads, now if you want a deal it's "take our corporate 20-year financing on an asset that will be fully depreciated in 8"

But the incentive to develop the skills should sort this out, no?

When GM realized they needed more mechanical engineers than existed, they built a whole university. These days, capital just whines. If you can spend $100 BILLION on data centers, you have the budget to stand up a proper school.

If enough money is on the table people can skill up fast.

I'm guessing we see a lot more of the latter than the former. Cutting edge knowledge industries might be an outlier here, but certainly for anything related to "factory work", it's probably true.

By framing it as a shortage of labor rather than a shorting of those looking to pay for labor, the employers hope to encourage more labor to flood the market [1] and lower prices further. This is a continuation of how we've gotten to the current predicament with most jobs being de-skilled commodities that don't pay enough to support their workers.

[0] another insidious framing is that by assuming instantaneous response, this downplays the importance of causality. But in the real world markets are not supercomputational.

[1] both private individuals choosing an educational path, and by government policy

It would make sense to say something like, "There is a shortage of skilled workers willing to work for $1 per hour", and no-one would be likely to argue with that - there certainly is a terrible shortage of such workers! But that makes it clear that the problem is the compensation, not the available workers.

If you just say "There is a shortage of skilled workers" without that context, it becomes a incomplete statement from an economics perspective, and the GP is essentially objecting to that and pointing out that once you take the necessary context into account, the problem is not some sort of more general shortage of workers.

It can however occur that a company requires skill x, cannot find a person for this position, and HR still refuses to increase salary for this position.

There is a mismatch in supply & demand of compensation. Not position.

> is totally represented by a shortage of qualified people for the given compensation.

Sounds like "I want to pay X, there's not enough willing to work for X, therefore there is a labor shortage." I know plenty of people who only want to pay $30 an hour for web development work. It might feel like a labor shortage to these people since they can't find many people willing to work for that wage, but in reality where the price they've chosen lands on the supply/demand curve there is almost no supply, but if they increased the wage, amazingly supply goes up too. If 30 seems high enough, imagine $5 an hour instead of $30. The actual number doesn't matter, it's where it falls on the spectrum that is relevant for this example.

If by "given compensation" you meant "market rate" then I think we're largely in agreement.

But some places are worst then rackets the town nearby.

It's not that they don't want to participate in the racket, it's that the racket literally can not sustain them. Older gens participate in the racket because most of them locked in housing or rents from an era where the racket could support those prices. Gen Z has much higher housing costs that make "the racket" untenable, despite the racket still working fine for older millenials just fine. Housing costs exploding, among other things, has ruined the ability of an entire generation to really thrive or ever have a chance of doing better than their parents.

Using Waffle House as an example is hard because it's a private company but food service profit margins aren't typically super high. A Waffle House, in a good location, I'm sure makes a good amount of money but the owners of those restaurants are often the hardest working employee there (and they are there, at least in the beginning) if they are going to succeed. Plus, those owners have loans to pay off at the beginning. It's a tough business.

There's more I could say but, the TL;DR is that most businesses aren't making the profits of a Google or Apple and don't usually have tons of spare cash around to give everyone a raise, as much as most (small) business owners would like to. Especially newly established restaurants, paying off business loans takes a big chunk of the revenue.

Chinese workers are much closer to earning what you would expect the globally average worker to earn.

You can not be long term more prosperous than the rest of the world, while consuming more and producing less. The prosperity in the west is the result of historic circumstance, where mass production of basically every good allowed for an enormous export of goods, while the west was radically innovating in science and engineering and every other field. That is where the prosperity came from.

50 years ago the average American auto worker was genuinely 10x more effective than his Chinese counterpart. That is why he earned so much more. Right now that is no longer the case. American companies can not make money by selling US made cars in China, it is an insane economic proposition. In fact American companies can not really make money selling cars anywhere but America (maybe some in Europe), which means that there is less money that American auto workers can make by producing cars.

>To me it seems much more ridiculous to expect Western citizens to accept a degradation in living standards for the abstract notion of some universal economic efficiency. Though you can easily argue we're headed that way, it's mostly because of government capture by multinational corps.

It is not ridiculous. It is inevitable and begging the government to stop it, is like begging the government to make 1 plus 1 equal 3. There is no economic policy that makes China less of a competitor. Whatever anyone "deserves" is putting a moral spin on something which is not a moral question.

China is just as good as America at making cars, in fact it is much better, especially at lower price points. This significantly lower the economic value any American worker can provide and by that it lowers the prosperity he can gain.

>Countries restrain naked competition all the time to benefit their people.

But it is competition between countries.

Pretty much everything that makes housing/living unaffordable is a result of intentional regulatory decisions between about 1960 and 2000 (with the biggest exception I can think of being the coopting of the IBC by various product manufactures, that picked up in the 2010s and beyond).

You can't live in a van or other mobile thing because zoning. You can't build a non-mobile thing by the river because wetlands. And even if you could the thing you want to build can't be build because the rules and the codes are riddled with carve outs to make work for well lobbied industries.