Original Audio.mp3

Ford CEO Jim Farley expressed frustration that the United Auto Workers (UAW) has not provided a counteroffer in the ongoing negotiations. He believes that the UAW is not negotiating in good faith and is instead planning to go on strike. Farley highlighted the potential impact of a strike on Ford's manufacturing, including the possibility of laying off workers and disrupting production. He emphasized that the UAW's demands would severely damage Ford's bottom line and make the company unsustainable. Despite being prepared for an extended strike, Farley urged for a historic deal to be reached before the strike deadline. Joining us now is Ford CEO Jim Farley with our own Phil LaBoeuf. Phil? John, thank you very much. Jim, we're a little over seven hours away from the strike deadline. Where do things stand? You've made your most recent offer. What have you heard back from the UAW? Well, everyone imagines we're in some room squirreled away doing this final negotiation, and that's what we love for the last two weeks. But nothing's going on. We've received no counteroffer from Sean Payne and the UAW. Nothing at all? No. And are you with the situation? Well, we've never seen it before. In 80 years, we've always been able to work through these differences because we're always on the side of labor at Ford. We have the highest UAW headcount. We have more people than anyone, build more vehicles. We've never seen anything like this. It's frustrating because many of our team members have negotiated successfully on non-economic issues with the national negotiators. But somehow when we get to these marquee money issues, everything stops, and it's a mystery. We've been putting contracts and negotiating with ourselves since the 29th for two weeks, and we still have not had any kind of counteroffer for all those major things, and we're on the eve of one of the largest strikes in our history. Do you believe Sean Payne is truly negotiating good faith, or do you think this is a case of he's not even giving you a counteroffer here? He's made a decision, we're going on strike. Well, I think he's certainly planning, when I saw Facebook Live, he didn't even acknowledge our offer that Bill Ford, the chairman of the company, made two days ago until last night, and we still have not gotten an offer. I don't know what Sean Payne is doing, but he's not negotiating this contract with us as it expires. But I know he's busy planning a strike. We don't want it. I know he thinks this will be a historic strike with all three plants, all three companies, but we want to make history with a historic deal. We have talked to people familiar with their plans in terms of what they might announce tonight. Livonia, your transmission plant, really the bread and butter in terms of putting the engines and the vehicles and everything together, that's going to be hit, according to what we understand. What would that do? What kind of chaos would that cause for your manufacturing? It's enormous. For an engine transmission or a stamping plant, all the downstream assembly plants would be affected within hours or days. And what most Americans don't realize is that although that would disrupt the manufacturing and the assembly of vehicles, many of those workers may not be eligible for the strike fund or for even unemployment. So at a personal level, our employees get hurt. So how quickly would you have to potentially lay off people from a final assembly plant because you're not getting transmissions in and therefore there's no production? Within hours or days, depending on the plant and how much float we have, we'll have to shut plants, assembly plants, hours or days. Quickly put in some perspective, the offer that they have, what they're demanding, relative to where you are right now, how much damage would that do to the bottom line? If you were to say, sure, we'll give you 40%. If we signed up for the UAW's request, instead of making money and distributing $75,000 in profit sharing in the last 10 years, we would have lost $15 billion and gone bankrupt by now. The average pay would be nearly $300,000 fully fringed for a four-day work week. There is no way for UAW. This is our fully tenured school teacher in the U.S. makes $66,000. Someone from the military or fireman makes mid-$50,000. They make four or five times, six times what they make. There's no way we can be sustainable as a company. That's why we put our proposal in two weeks ago to say, look, you want us to choose bankruptcy over supporting our workers? Here's our proposal. Let's work through this. We've heard nothing. Last question, how worried are you that this could be an extended strike? Worried, but we're prepared. We're professionals, 120-year-old company. We've seen wars. We've seen pandemics. We're prepared. My team is fantastic. But it's not necessary. We still have a few hours to go. Let's go. Let's get a historic deal done.