Ford Creates Jobs By The Truckload
Lower gas prices and a turn-around in the housing market rekindled America’s love for the pickup, resulting in 2,000 new jobs at Ford’s Kansas City Assembly Plant.
The near doubling of the plant’s staffing is in response to surging demand for the Ford F-150 and the 2014 production start of the new Ford Transit. Suppliers are expected to grow their business accordingly. “According to the job multiplier effect of nine jobs to every one – more than 18,000 jobs will be created to support the plant,” Ford says in a statement.
Ford is investing $1.1 billion to retool and expand the facility for production of both the F-150 and Transit, including a 437,000 sq.-ft. stamping facility and a 78,000 sq.-ft. paint shop.
Ford says the expansion brings it “three-quarters of the way to its plan to create 12,000 hourly jobs in the U.S. by 2015.” That target was set in a deal Ford had cut with the UAW in 2011.
According to Reuters, “about 1,000 of the workers will be hired at the entry-level wage. Entry-level workers start at $15.78 an hour or nearly half the pay of traditional unskilled blue-collar Ford workers.
Bertel Schmitt comes back to journalism after taking a 35 year break in advertising and marketing. He ran and owned advertising agencies in Duesseldorf, Germany, and New York City. Volkswagen A.G. was Bertel's most important corporate account. Schmitt's advertising and marketing career touched many corners of the industry with a special focus on automotive products and services. Since 2004, he lives in Japan and China with his wife <a href="http://www.tomokoandbertel.com"> Tomoko </a>. Bertel Schmitt is a founding board member of the <a href="http://www.offshoresuperseries.com"> Offshore Super Series </a>, an American offshore powerboat racing organization. He is co-owner of the racing team Typhoon.
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The good thing about increases in truck sales driven by low gas prices and a stout housing market is that history proves they are inherently reliable and stable long-term and never ever stop. Honestly, I hope the domestics learned something from the last time this happened and are not over-investing in a truck boom that *is* going to collapse once gas noses over $4/gallon again. At least now they have a lineup of good competitive cars to fall back on in every market segment. That wasn't really the case the last time truck sales tanked.
The big difference this time is that Ford hasn't neglected the fuel efficient small cars. At the very least, what they're offering is competitive with all the other major players.
I believe that people have become accustomed to higher gas prices and are no longer willing to make trade offs for such, Americans have a totally different mindset then most of the world which sets us apart. There are so many factors in favor of buying bigger vehicles that make small things such as gas prices have become irrelevant. The ones truly hurt by gas prices are the small business owners who have to stretch every penny and be able to keep up with the chains, coincidentally their also the first to feel loss of sales as people have less money (from among other things gas) to make purchases, which are either postponed or bought from chains that have the capital to offer better deals/payment plans.
Gotta love extremely low margin fleet sales to keep the lights on.......Ford will be hurting big time when the market tanks again.