Just as a fact check - a good % of these workers are actually employed at ACH - a group of parts suppliers Ford bought back from Visteon last year with the intent of closing the plants. In other words, those workers have already been replaced by other suppliers. In many cases those are the EXACT same suppliers that they have used on other vehicles and that other manufacturers (Honda, Toyota, Nissan, etc) use. Absolutely no risk of quality loss there.
The remainder of the work? If they were losing skilled machinists, it would be an issue. But have you seen a car plant in the last 20 years? The vast majority of jobs are simple - put part A on a fixture (there's no real way to screw it up), stand back and press the big green button. The janitors are unionized, too - does that take special skill to protect car quality? There are some skilled jobs to be certain, but easily more than half are simple tasks you could train someone to do in half a day. Your plant HR and safety related training will take longer.
Exactly. I recently toured the GM Arlington plant again, and there are *no* jobs on that line that you couldn't grab Joe off the street and teach him to do as well as the current holder of the position in about an hour or so.
If you can be replaced by a raw recruit that will do the job just as well after less than a day of training on the task, guess what? You're not skilled labor, and you don't need to get paid on that sort of scale. Sorry.
Eraser2005--thanks for the explanation. I too thought that there has been so much robotization and NCM that you'd have to really be down to the very skilled labor by this round of downsizing. What you say makes sense to me.
Looking back over my posts, I apologize if my tone was not more civil--it is the limitation of this medium sometimes.