Posted on 01/27/2006 8:14:40 AM PST by oxcart
Employees at Ford's Dearborn Truck Plant in Dearborn, Mich., will have to drive Ford Motor Co. vehicles to work or park across the street, the plant manager announced earlier this week.
The new parking policy, which is scheduled to take effect Feb. 1, was instituted by plant manager Rob Webber just as Ford reported losses of $1.6 billion from its North American auto operations in 2005 and Monday announced plans to close 14 plants and cut 30,000 jobs as it tries to reverse losses and respond to declining U.S. market share.
(Excerpt) Read more at money.cnn.com ...
I've 130K on my '96 Contour and 170K on my '88 Mustang.
I think the Contour is going to need new struts before long.
And let's take it a step farther. I say that anyone who works at McDonald's can only eat McDonald's food. God forbid some employee get caught eating somewhere else. And anyone working at a Fred Meyer's store. If they don't do all of their shopping at Fred Meyers and the boss finds out they actually went to Walmart, then let them cry their way to the unemployment office. Oh, and employees of telephone companies. If they are caught using a calling-card from a business not owned by their employer, fire them.
Maybe one of our legislators could come up with a law that says a citizen's employer has the right to dictate to their employees how and where they will spend their paycheck.
Gotta love freedom of choice. Freedom for employers to choose what is best for you and your family.
How nice of them. LOL I don't suppose the employees who aren't driving Fords will have to pay extra for parking now that they can't park in the lot of the place they work at? I don't know, just curious here.
BTW, is it just me, or does anyone else find it odd that this Ford guru thinks for one minute that we all decide which make and model of vehicle we will purchase based on the employee parking at their plant? If this isn't one of the dumbest things I've heard of, it's at least up there with a few other ridiculous items.
You get the gold star! Good analogy, and spot on. :)
How do you figure the comment was a "lack of support for owner's rights".
An opinion is an opinion, nothing more, nothing less. I don't think folks are saying Ford shouldn't have the RIGHT to make this new rule, some (including myself) are just saying that they believe the new parking rules are rather silly, perhaps unfair, and not a good business move.
Got power door locks? How're they doing?
The inlaws' car -- we had to borrow it, owning, as we do, a Ford :), turned out to be a Ford itself; and since we were taking it to a city where it would not be prudent to not lock the doors, we were faced with a dilemma, since the right front door would not lock.
The problem was that the motor that drove the door lock was siezed -- a common issue, I was lead to understand.
In desperation, I spent a few quality hours dismantling the door so that I could removed the locked-up lock motor, so that the door could be manually locked. And away we went!
In retrospect, some thoughts on the absurdity of 1) using an expensive, complex, trouble-prone (IMO the design, construction, and placement of the motor, pretty much guarantees that it's going to be "subject to the elements" at some time during the service life of the vehicle), expensive motor rather than a simple, reliable, inexpensive, solenoid, and, 2) desiging a system with in which that fragile single point of failure would prevent any manual use of the door lock. And finally, 3) making it a real bitch to service! I mean, really -- if you're going to design something subject to a failure mode of that type, must you make it a curse-your-bloody-lungs-out affair to get to and remove the accursed component? (Well, if you're being paid by the hour, I guess you wouldn't be cursing like a sailor :) -- but I wasn't being paid, period. I was doing it to prevent their car from being vandalized and/or stolen while we were borrowing it. The fact that they got a quasi-repair "for free" was a side effect of the process.)
Oh, right -- my thoughts on the above: Stupid, stupid, stupid. But, profitable, when the customer pays the "parts and labor" to have the system repaired replaced. And pay he will, if he wants to lock his door! Golly, a built-in motivator! (Irony alert: What do you call a defective activator? You call it a motivator!)
Color me cynical.
PS: As difficult as the job above is described as being, please keep in mind some facts. Although I am a (cranky) old bastard, in my youth, I spent a lot of time underneath cars (including their hoods and "bottoms"). I know (from experience) how to replace a water pump, an alternator, a distributor, a transmission, an engine head, a timing belt, a timing chain, etc., etc., etc. I can rebuild a carb. I can balance a pair of SU side-draft carbs -- by eye -- and, I can adjust distributor advance, by ear! I can... aw, you get the picture. I am not a neophyte to "The Greasy World of Cars." Granted, I'm not the one to call if you want to grind a racing cam, or rebuild an automatic tranny, but by the same token, I'm not a helpless yuppie who doesn't have a clue as to what goes on in front of the firewall.
Second, as fortune would have it, I just happened to have the factory shop manual for that car on CD, since that model "came along for the ride" on the CD I'd purchased for my wife's Ford. I studied the door/lock mechanism before diving into the job, and, I printed up several pages of diagrams and instructions prior to heading out to the driveway. It wasn't a case of "unprepared dolt takes toolbox and no clue to tackle job he's completely ignorant of."
That is all.
Well, y'know, if it was MY job, I'd comply.
I'd go out and buy the cheapest POS Ford clunker that I could find. Just barely road-legal. Just enough to pass muster if pulled over by Johnnie Law (i.e., muffler proper dB, windows uncracked, lights working). Paint looking like crap (what's left of it, that is). Rust-cancered body. Dented to hell and back. Ugly city.
The bumper sticker would say, "My other car is a 2006 Chevy!" (or Toyota, or whatever my real car happened to be).
Every morning, I'd pull up to the gate, and smile at the guard.
Go ahead, "key" my car, LOL!
(Naturally, I would carry "comprehensive" on it, in case some UAWart-hog decided to get really jacked off and bust a window or whatnot.)
There is a way to "comply", and make the bully wish he'd kept his f'n mouf shut.
LOL!
I'm lead to believe that solenoids sieze up, too.
I initially had that thought for the motor, too, until I got that sucker out of the door and into my hand.
They engineered it in such as way as to make it impossible to repair or rebuild. You cannot open it without destroying it. Cute.
Plus, a locked-up solenoid would be fairly trivial to bypass. This door was designed so that when the motor locks up, you cannot manually lock the door. That's just bad IMO.
I don't respond well to "have to" myself, but these workers are too stupid to realize that not only do their own purchases from other makers not help with job security, but what their purchase says to everyone who knows they work there has a mutiplier effect.
I've driven just about every manufacturers cars over the last 30 years and done are so bad that I couldn't buy one given the huge discount that Ford/GM/Chrysler offer to their employees.
Then again no one ever confused autoworkers who think that they owe their job to the union and not to the company that pays them with rocket scientists. Come to think of it, no one from Ford/GM/Chrysler management has sent anyone to the moon recently either.
Again we are in the minority. Oh well, it's less crowded that way.
And what about the guy who owns a car from the verboten brands list prior to taking the job?
Or the employee who's Ford dies, and in the same timeframe, he inherits a car from The Verboten Brand List?
Or... the scenarios are endless.
"Taking a job" and "buying a car" are not two events that are linked at the mons pubis.
This decision is heavy-handed, short-sighted, and stupid -- and suggestive of a kind of corporate desperation.
What next? Demanding that all mortgages be done via Ford Credit? All clothing bear the Ford logo?
The fact that one entity "can" coerce another into doing something upon pain of termination of employment may be "legal", but that does not make it right.
Recall the title of a recent book on he vagaries of the Lord Clinton Regime, titled something like, "Because He Could."
Then.... extrapolate.
It seems to me that it wasn't long ago that the unions demanded that the employees could only drive union made American cars to park in these same lots.
How can you effectively sell your product when you yourself bought your competitors?
What we did at our dealership in the 80's was require that every car had to have our plate frame on it, so even if you had a competitor's car, it wasn't readily apparent. We offered 4 different makes and employees were encouraged, but not forced, to take advantage of the great prices that were available to them.
Sometimes a job is just a job.
You're right. They can go get another one.
............smells like Alltel.
Your example with the bank is hardly apropos.
You are a Ford employee parking your XYC car in the Ford lot. Your banking affiliation isn't in anyone's face, much less your employer's.
The typical discount that I have seen for employees and supplier employees can be twice what the general consumer can get. That's an additional $1500 or more on many cars.
If that benefit is being taxed, then you have a problem with the government. The manufacturer isn't responsible for the tax consequences.
www.pafairtax.org
We're talking about unionized auto workers. How can you tell if something that you did pissed them off? If they aren't born that way, they must get trained by the union.
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