Liberal Talk Radio

Offer it, and they will accept it:

Thirty thousand Ford Motor Company workers — nearly half of the automaker’s unionized work force — have agreed to leave their jobs in exchange for a buyout or a package of early retirement benefits, the company said this morning.

All of the 75,000 Ford employees represented by the United Automobile Workers union were offered eight different deals worth as much as $140,000 in September, and had to decide by Monday whether to accept.

In all, 38,000 U.A.W. workers at Ford have now agreed to take buyouts this year, including 8,000 who accepted packages offered at specific plants earlier in the year, before the company made the deals available to its entire hourly work force.

The departures will leave Ford with its smallest workforce in decades.

Combined with almost 34,000 employees who took buyouts over the summer — reducing G.M.’s hourly payroll by about one-third — the Ford announcement brings to 72,000 the number of workers at Detroit’s automakers who have voluntarily agreed to leave an industry that can no longer can guarantee them the high wages and job security enjoyed by their parents and grandparents.

The “take rate” at Ford surpassed the expectations both of management and of Wall Street analysts, and will allow Ford to reduce its costs faster than called for in the company’s much-discussed overhaul plan, called the Way Forward. Ford said earlier in the year that it needed to eliminate 25,000 to 30,000 jobs as it closes plants and sheds production capacity left idle as the company’s market share in the United States declines.

Union leaders were apparently surprised by the high take rate as well: before the Monday deadline, news reports said they expected only about 15,000 workers to accept a buyout.

What, does everyone think we’re stupid or something? Who wouldn’t accept money to quit their job?

On a somewhat related note, something that’s been bothering me for a while is the idea just how much more competitive businesses could be if workers weren’t shackled to jobs because of health insurance. I probably would have had six jobs in the time I’ve now spent languishing in one — and I imagine both my employer and potential employers would have been much happier with a hungrier employee who actually wanted to be there.

I would be much more interested in holding two or more interesting jobs versus the one boring job that basically just exists to provide me with insurance. Take out the insurance part and employers looking for part-time help would have a better applicant pool to pick from. It would make everyone and everything more efficient. Why policymakers don’t take this into account is strange to me.