You have a good point. However, your average company employee usually has very little control over the quality of the product. They may notice an obviously defective part going down the line and pull it before it ends up in a finished vehicle on a very rare occasion, but for the most part they spend their time moving parts around and watching machines run.
However, there's a lot that goes into making an automobile desirable. A large part of it is determined in the design, and even good designs can still result in a product that doesn't meet a consumer's needs as well as a competitor's design. It's also possible that the particular features of the vehicle Ford makes doesn't suit their worker's needs as well as a vehicle made by Chevy.
If Ford wants all their employees to drive their cars, then they need to given them enough incentive to overcome that, and in some cases, it's just not going to be practical.
If the employee won't buy it, then why would anyone else
Because in many cases, one size does not fit all, despite the best efforts of designers.
Heck we've all talked about why we wouldn't want to purchase vehicles made now, after the layoffs, etc. because the workers would not have any incentive to do a good job..
Now what exactly does that say about these employees ??
It says that we don't trust them. However, the vast majority of quality problems come from bad processes, not from individual workers not doing their jobs well.
Much of the work that could have resulted in poor quality decades ago is automated now. Manufacturing relies much less on skilled trades than it once did.
When unions drove up the costs of skilled labor so high, they effectively priced themselves out of a job by encouraging companies to investing in developing and purchasing automated systems. Automation allows for more consistent quality and allowed for hiring less expensive employees.
My wife worked for a while designing databases that a truck manufacturing company used to track their manufacturing process. They track an amazing amount of data that lets them go back and find what is causing poor products to be produced and fix the problem.
When they get that plant up and running fully they will have an incredible ability to track problems back to their source. However, considering some of the stories my wife has told me about their management, there's still a decent change that they will fail to fix any of the problems once they are aware of them.
Employees decide the bad processes though, ok, maybe not the line workers, but management are employees just as much as the line worker is...
Bad decisions are made by employees too, because all management, other than the board of directors, are employees. I'm not referring to the highest decision makers, but there are so many decisions made at lower levels
While I'm sure there is enough "blame" to go around, I really do place much of this at the feet of the union. Because the union believes that they are the first and final word in everything to the detriment of the company and especially the employee.