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AUGUST 23, 2022
Meyerson on TAP
Layoffs May Be White-Collar Now, but Here Come the Blues
Ford signals a near-term downturn, and a long-term deeper problem.
The company that invented modern mass production announced yesterday
that there'd be a little less of that for the immediate-and
not-so-immediate-future.
On Monday, Ford Motors said
that it was laying off 3,000 workers-2,000 of them white-collar
employees and the remaining 1,000 white-collar contract workers. The
move was reported to be part of Ford's efforts to transition to making
electric cars-a move that will eventually require a reduction in its
internal-combustion workforce. What's more distressing to the unions
representing that workforce at Ford and elsewhere-most prominently the
UAW in the United States and IG Metall in Germany-is that building
electric cars will require fewer workers than building fuel-powered
cars, as the number of parts in an electric car is 30 percent lower than
the number in gas-guzzlers.
There are two distinct problems on the job-creation front in
manufacturing. The immediate one is less evident at Ford than it is at a
range of microchip manufacturers, who evidently fear
that a reduction in consumer buying power (see personal ad: Federal
Reserve Seeks Recession) will lessen the demand for their product, and
are beginning to cut back on production. To be clear, the three pieces
of landmark legislation that Joe Biden has signed into law-the
Infrastructure Act, the Chips Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act
(which is really a Green Energy Investment Act)-will all boost
manufacturing in the long term. They signal a long-overdue embrace of
industrial policy and onshoring, which together add up to a clear
repudiation of the past four decades of federal policy favoring
financialization over domestic production and domestic-production
workers. The impact of these policy reversals may be muted for a while
as companies fear a recession, but the more enduring impact will be
distinctly positive.
There is, however, a troubling limit to these policies' benefits that
isn't ephemeral. It's that production, and not just of electric
cars, requires a steadily diminishing number of workers. Compare any
photo of the shop floor of a steel mill or an auto or aircraft assembly
line taken in the mid-20th century to any such photo today, and what
leaps out is the radically smaller number of workers in the latter
photos. Machinery and technology now do much of the work that once
required humans-a substitution most visible in manufacturing, but also
present in construction, retail, and both the more rote and the more
precision-requiring sectors of various professions.
At a company like Ford, the white-collar layoffs are the tip of the
iceberg. Underneath, eventually, are the blues.
~ HAROLD MEYERSON
Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter
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like a predatory scheme. BY DAVID DAYEN
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