After the last eight months of complete uncertainty and helplessness related to whether or not any of us in the salaried workforce would continue to have jobs, it's my opinion that we need some type of collective representation within the company.
This entire exercise has been carried out with only one focus in mind, decreasing costs, and increasing profits to please shareholders and raise share price. Despite making $7 billion in profit last year, and having another $17 billion of cash saved, the company continues to cut jobs. Jim Hackett made $18 million last year, which is more than 250 TIMES the median salary of a normal employee at Ford.
This situation will only get more dire as time goes on. Ford is no longer an automotive or a mobility company. It's a profit company. Its sole focus is to deliver good quarterly results and returns to shareholders. And this problem is not at all restricted to Ford. We are at a point in our economy where the only focus is on profit margins and returns. Any loyalty large companies may have had to their employees in the past is nonexistent.
And also note that I am absolutely NOT advocating for something like the UAW, which has evolved to have its own hierarchy and has been repeatedly found to be conspiring with the auto companies themselves at the expense of the hourly workers. The UAW is corrupt and is a bad example of what collective representation should be.
I can't say that I have all the answers, but we need some way to be represented collectively as one group as opposed to all going it alone in the face of these layoffs. Separately and individually we have no leverage against the company. But if we were able to collectively say stop it with the layoffs or we will all walk off the job, we would have power over the company. We've seen this pattern repeat itself enough times in the past that even after this round of cuts is over, it's likely that we'll just be facing them again a few years from now. The only way we can do anything to stop this cycle is to band together.
And I understand that many people will say that there are workers that don't do their fair share and need to be fired, and that's fair. But we've already seen that these cuts are rarely carried out truly based on each individual person's merit. Regardless of your performance in the company, is there anyone that hasn't been at least somewhat concerned that they may be facing a layoff over the last eight months? Bad employees are one issue and that definitely needs to be dealt with, but it shouldn't stand in the way of recognizing that as a whole we need to come together to try to fend off future cuts.
Inequality has been skyrocketing in this country for decades, and I only ask everyone to recognize that the threats we face as the working class are only going to grow from here on. But as the workers that actually make this company run day to day, we need to find a way to band together to ensure our future job security.