Ford perd 13 milliards en 2006

[Gaby]

En 2006, Ford a perdu 12.7 milliards de dollars dont près de la moitié sur le dernier trimestre.

La politique de l'entreprise est de diminuer son volume d'activité afin d'assurer des profits à partir d'une production réduite, reconnaissant la suprématie de ses concurrents General Motors et Toyota. Pour cela, 9 usines vont être fermées en 2007 et en 2006, 44000 salariés ont d'ores et déjà été licenciés en échange d'une contrepartie variable pour ceux-ci. Cette contrepartie globale est la première responsable des mauvais résultats comptables de Ford.

L'entreprise espère faire à nouveau des bénéfices en 2009, cette année n'étant qu'une étape dans sa réorganisation. Bref, un désastre pour des dizaines de milliers de travailleurs alors qu'on n'attend des actionnaires que de la patience.

Plus obscène encore, afin de conserver ses haut cadres qui seraient tentés de chercher un emploi chez un concurrent, Ford va leur offrir dans le courant de l'année de larges primes dans ce contexte pourtant calamiteux pour les ouvriers. Le syndicat United Automobile Workers commence à grincer des dents.

C'est ici pour les anglophones :
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/25/business...PDOn3NtrlLU+2iw

[Gaby]

Un texte très énervé comme on les aime de nos camarades de the Spark, sur la situation générale de l'industrie américaine :

Resolution for 2007: If the Bosses Demand Concessions, Tell Them Where to Shove It!

Want to know what the bosses have in store for us in 2007? Just look at what they did last year.

They chiseled out a bigger chunk of wealth for themselves at our expense. Profits, after taxes, are twice as high as they were just five years ago. The wealthy are literally swimming in money. They are speculating in stocks, bonds and real estate at a feverish pace. They buy and sell companies, merge companies and then break them apart.

Last year, one investment bank, Goldman Sachs, made so much money speculating, it gave its executives 16 billion dollars in bonuses. That’s right, 16 billion dollars to a handful of speculators.

In 2006, Delphi and other big auto parts companies continued the bankruptcy charade. And corporate raiders, starting with Wilbur Ross, announced that they wanted to buy them. During the 1990s, Ross bought up supposedly bankrupt steel companies and then resold them a few years later for five times what he paid for them – making billions in one stroke. The auto bosses may claim to be broke today, but the auto companies are golden apples that speculators are fighting to grab.

For workers, it’s a different world. Most of us have to cope with shrinking pay checks – worth less than they were 30 years ago – and fewer benefits. And don’t talk about our debt burden.

In 2006, we faced outsourcing, downsizing and speed-up. Full-time jobs were replaced by temps at much lower wages and few if any benefits. GM, Ford and Delphi led the way.

But government agencies were quick to follow, claiming they can no longer afford pensions or health benefits. No – they were too busy shoveling big tax cuts, subsidies and sweetheart contracts to the big corporations and to the wealthy

This is where we were at the end of 2006. For 2007, the bosses want to replay the same game.

Whether they get away with it is another question. This depends on what workers decide to do when companies or government agencies come for them. It depends on how workers react when the companies or government tell them that they have to make more sacrifices in order to save a cash-rich company from supposed ruin.

We’ve learned through bitter experience that wage and benefit cuts don’t save jobs. That’s just a bunch of garbage. And nothing stops us from telling the bosses and their politicians where they can shove their lies and their threats.

Certainly, no one group of workers can turn back the attacks by themselves. But workers in one industry or even one workplace can dig in their heels. They can say, “NO.” And what one group of workers starts, others can pick up.

Instead of being on the defensive, we can put the bosses on the defensive. We can force the bosses to meet the workers’ needs and priorities.

Certainly, workers have the power to take on the bosses. Workers produce the vast, ever expanding wealth that flows throughout this country.

We produce everything, and make everything run. In 2007, we can start to make use of this power we have over production to force the bosses backward.

Why not?

[Gaby]

Et ici, un article du dernier journal, qui insiste sur les bénéfices que les cadres et les actionnaires se réservent alors que les ouvriers paient la note. La position défensive de l'UAW n'est pas épargnée.

Auto concessions: Don’t fall for any more rich men’s lies

Going into a big game, what coach would tell his players to prepare to lose? Worse yet, what coach would tell his players that they would be better off if the other team won?

That’s exactly what the leadership of the United Auto Workers (UAW) is telling its team, in these months before the new September 2007 contract.

While Ford’s CEO Alan Mulally is saying, “The only thing I care about is the competitiveness of Ford,” a UAW vice-president, Bob King, only echoes him: “I’m bullish on Ford. We have had to go through these horrible things – the massive buyouts – but we end up with a better product and company.” In other words, King just told his team that it has to lose so the other team can win!

For whatever reasons, the top union leadership has chosen to focus workers’ attention on the very things the companies want: sacrifices. Not on how to avoid making sacrifices! But only on what sacrifices will be made. The intent is to form a mind-set among the workers that sacrifices are inevitable in the 2007 contract and nothing can be done about it. It’s just too bad, they say – but the companies are in trouble.

The companies are not in trouble. The companies are rich as can be.

Take General Motors, which during 2005 and early 2006 declared far and wide that it was nearly bankrupt because of underfunded health care programs for retirees. Bankrupt! Ten billion dollars in the hole! About to go under! Months and months of such orchestrated public-relations baloney.

But a funny thing happened after they got what they wanted from the retirees. Suddenly the public relations blitz disappeared, the ten billion dollars in the hole was forgotten, and their stock began to climb. In 2006, GM’s stock was the best performing of all the stocks in the Dow Jones Industrial Average! And at the Detroit Auto Show Bob Lutz said, “We won’t be satisfied with just a few billion in profits.” They were going after everything they could get.

Or how about Chrysler? The Chrysler Group of DaimlerChrysler (DCX) showed three years of profits. Twelve straight quarters of profits! But when workers were not in the mood to agree to the same retiree health cuts and dollar-an-hour wage cuts that were nearly voted down by GM workers, and even more nearly by Ford workers, CEO Dieter Zetsche complained, “It’s a very strange position that we should first lose 10 billion dollars before we have the same [concessions] as Ford and GM.... We will not stop before we get the results we need.”

The very next quarter, Chrysler’s books showed a very unexpected 1.2 billion-dollar loss! And the UAW promised to “re-examine” the concessions! Even though Chrysler Group’s sales for 2006 actually ROSE compared to 2005!

Or take Ford. Ford’s Executive Vice President Mark Fields had his weekend “commute” paid by the company – exclusive use of the company plane to fly from Detroit to his family in south Florida every weekend! The cost was estimated at about 70,000 per weekend, or some 3,500,000 per year. When Field’s list of luxury perks made the news, he gave up the plane. If Ford had been in all the trouble management claimed it was in, he would have given up the plane long before!

It’s the same for all the companies. Their executives sacrifice nothing, their banks sacrifice nothing, their largest shareholders do nothing but rake in the dividends.

These huge companies can change their books one quarter and change them back the next quarter. They can recruit their allied companies, banks and brokerages to join in the scheme. Steve Miller said of the Delphi bankruptcy, it was “well planned, well structured and well financed.”

The news media always quotes an auto “analyst” who is the son of a previous GM CEO. And not to be forgotten is the episode a few years ago, when GM pulled a whole three months of its advertising budget from a California newspaper that was examining GM’s affairs a little too “critically.”

They carry out their scams to rob the workers like public relations campaigns. Ford Motor Company retained marketers from University of Michigan to conduct studies on how best to persuade workers to take early buy-outs. They approached it no differently than figuring how to sell the latest model car: how to create the necessary illusions to persuade the “customer” to bite.

The corporate lies are endless. UAW leaders who go along with these lies betray the workers.

When workers give back concessions to the companies, they get no guarantees. No! Just the opposite. Concessions encourage management to come back for still more concessions. When you give up wages to save jobs, they take your jobs, too.

The workers’ only real protection is to see the corporate swindles for what they are, and act on it. Refuse the concessions – each and every one of them!