Ford-UAW Concessions Contract:
Profit Addicts Want More

Oct 26, 2009

Even as Ford UAW workers are being pressured to accept another concessions contract, Wall Street announced that Ford could report a surprise third quarter profit! (After reporting a 1^st quarter profit of 2.8 billion dollars and a 2^nd quarter profit of 2.3 billion!)

Profits? Yes, profits.

So don’t come telling that lie that Ford is in bad shape.

But whether good shape or bad, Ford drains wealth from the workers’ labor.

Here is a company owned for all practical purposes by 50 people with the last name of Ford. This one family has controlling interest in the company, owning 70.85 million shares of Class B stock, so even if they get a dividend of only a penny a share, each makes $170,000 a pop. Three times what we make in one year!

Here is a company that has made billions and billions of profit off the labor of Ford workers and has used those billions to extend their empire which includes 90 plants on six continents, not counting its financial operations and real estate holdings.

Here is a company that even in the years it reported profit losses by its creative accounting maneuvers, paid huge dividends to its stockholders and bought up other companies. In 2006, supposedly their record-loss year, it paid one man, CEO Alan Mulally, 39 million dollars for four months of work!

Here is a company that came in March, less than seven months ago, to exact another round of concessions (on top of the 2005 and 2007 contracts) that cost each worker about $15,000 each, bragging that it had saved 500 million dollars. And then turned around and announced it was investing nearly 500 million dollars to build a third Ford car assembly plant in China!

Ford demands that workers must sacrifice when times are bad, and when times are good. Workers have every reason to refuse–good times or bad!