Not long ago, a story in the New York Times announced that union members had voted-down Ford Motor Company’s request for help in achieving further cost savings. Essentially, the union membership said, “Sorry, but we’ve given enough.”
As a backdrop for this development, recent marketing messages for the company have celebrated increasing quality and customer satisfaction scores, increasing sales, and increasing profits. It all sounds like a lot of great news… in an industry that’s been going through a very tough time.
Implications: I write this blog entry not to single-out Ford… but to recognize it as perhaps an indicator of things we might expect, as (hopefully) the recovery continues to build momentum. On some scale, many companies will eventually go through the conundrum that Ford is now facing.
Lots of companies asked their labor pool to “share the pain” as they navigated the deep recession of 2008-2009. That pain was distributed in the form of pay cuts, furloughs, reductions in staff (resulting in a higher workload for remaining employees at the same or often lower pay), and the trimming or elimination of employment benefits.
As the turn-around grows, companies might find their labor relations tested… if renewed prosperity for the corporation fails to trickle-down to the employment population.
One should note that in The Times story, Ford warns that failure to accept additional cuts could result in more outsourcing, and further reductions in domestic factory employment. These possibilities notwithstanding, union members have drawn a line in the sand. Perhaps that conflict can be attributed to a company whose workers have heard woeful news internally, compared with messages of prosperity and hope in external marketing… and are now having difficulty reconciling the two.
Because the employees of a company ultimately determine the quality of goods produced, or the quality of the service customers receive... this could be an imminently relevant consumer trend. Happy customers are seldom produced by unhappy companies.
Mike Anderson
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