While President Joe Biden has heralded Ford Motor Company as an example of a U.S. entity following his dictates for a "transition" from fossil fuels to alternative (read: more expensive and less reliable) energy, it turns out the exemplar of "Made in America" might also mean "fired in America" as the company struggles to rise to Biden's challenge while remaining profitable.
According to new reporting from Reuters, around 8,000 Ford employees' jobs are on the chopping block as the automaker tries to shift to an electric vehicle business despite trailing successful EV producers like Elon Musk's Tesla — a company President Biden has ignored despite its success.
The 8,000 Ford jobs in jeopardy, according to Reuters, are part of "a bid to reduce costs and intensify its focus on electric vehicles" and will be made to "Ford's salaried workforce, as well as the Ford Blue unit created in March to run the company's internal combustion engine operations." The positions to be eliminated have, according to Reuters' sources, not been finalized but the cuts "are likely to begin this summer."
Despite its apparent need to cut jobs in order to make their "transition" happen, a spokesman for Ford happily explained that "[t]o deliver our Ford+ transformation and lead this exciting and disruptive new era of electric and connected vehicles, we remain focused on reshaping our work and modernizing our organization across all automotive business units and across the company." The spokesman added that Ford has "laid out clear targets to lower our cost structure to ensure we are lean."
The corporate jargon admitting that meeting Biden's goals means cutting American jobs again fails to acknowledge Tesla's role in popularizing electric vehicles as a viable mode of transportation, or that Ford has a significant uphill battle to convince everyday Americans that the significantly higher cost for electric vehicles is a good investment that can meet their needs.
The cost to Ford isn't cheap either. Planning to spend $50 billion on EVs over the next four years, Ford has acknowledged that their "transitioned" electric vehicle operation won't even be profitable until at least 2025, per Reuters.
As recently as June, President Biden was hyping up Ford for its decision to go along with his administration's crusade against fossil fuels while seeking to discredit Elon Musk's concerns about the sorry state of the economy under Biden. "Ford is increasing the investment in building new electric vehicles," Biden said — conveniently ignoring the fact that those investments would come at a cost elsewhere within Ford's budget.
Reporter: Elon Musk has said he has a super bad feeling about the U.S. Economy.
— ForAmerica (@ForAmerica) June 3, 2022
Biden: "Ford is increasing the investment in building new electric vehicles... Chrysler corporation are also making similar investments... so, you know, lots of luck on his trip to the moon." pic.twitter.com/QziXH5llWT
While Biden has not been asked directly about Ford's planned layoffs to meet Biden's call for an energy "transition," it's unlikely he'll admit that the point of his "Build Back Better" agenda was to kill off American jobs along with American energy. But, as Katie has repeatedly highlighted, "the pain is the point" of Biden's assault on safe, reliable, and cheap energy.
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