Despite TIME’s fellatial cover story and Wall Street’s predictably giddy reaction, it is not in fact good news that Ford Motor Co. is going to sack 30,000 employees. CEO Bill Ford doesn’t deserve the lion’s share of the blame for this, since the decline has been going on for decades, but it nonetheless seems a little macabre to treat him like a hero. And upper management at Ford deserves a hell of a lot more contempt and pink slips than they seem to be receiving.
Anyway, I was brewing up a long post about all this, but over on Sciencegate, Paul Tullis did it for me. So go read what he said. Particularly this:
The sad thing is that it’s not the dumbass executives who made these decisions who are getting canned, it’s the workers who had nothing to do with it. Not to get all Marxist on you & all, but that’s a fact: A third of its hourly employees are getting pink slips, but only 10 percent of salarymen. What about the guy who said, “You know what we need? A luxury SUV! I present– the Lincoln Navigator!” Or the guy who said, “What we need is a slightly smaller, equally inefficient SUV! I present– the Lincoln Aviator!” Or the guy who said, “We can make more money if we put truck bodies on passenger car frames.” And the guy who said, “Forget a competitor to the Corolla– these Escalades are the #1 carjacking target in Southern California!” Are they getting shown the door?
