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Ford has about 65 factories. Assembly plant in Chicago employs about 4500 people. If factory has to work 24h/day you have to have 3 shifts and probably somethin

by hawski 10y ago

Ford has about 65 factories. Assembly plant in Chicago employs about 4500 people. If factory has to work 24h/day you have to have 3 shifts and probably something extra for the weekend and holidays. For me 200k employed at Ford seem reasonable.

bluedino 10y ago
>> For me 200k employed at Ford seem reasonable. On top of this think of how much work they have contractors doing that don't count towards the 200k
- fuzzfactor 10y ago
  The fundamental difference with Ford. Even though most of the Ford employees are not devoting their full effort toward physically adding value to natural-resource-derived materials, some of them are, that's where the wealth is generated and the reason money comes in. At a company with none of these type employees generating the profits, wealth originates from markets, not materials themselves. Ford may appear to be a bureaucracy (because it is), but it is not a pure bureaucracy. The non-material companies CAN be operated as pure bureaucracies, and the more pure, the greater degree that success comes from streamlined and efficient bureaucratic processes. Companies like Ford might also need to have as streamlined and efficient bureaucratic processes as possible (simply because many types of bureaucracy can often be a dead weight). For that reason, either type of company might also profit most when the smallest amount of bureaucracy actually is imposed on the fraction of employees who are devoting their full effort toward adding value, whether it is through materials processing, data processing, etc. Even though facebook and Google might be making a profit on every piece of hardware they are involved in, that is not where significant amounts of their money comes from. They are huge but it didn't come from them creating wealth from scratch. Market-dependence of course applies to either type of employment organization, but there are extremely different weightings between capital markets, materials markets, and sales markets between such diverse industries, depending on where the money is coming from at the time. Ford & Morgan, Stanley also are large and successful companies that were founded before most anybody living was ever born. Which is also huge, but everybody knows that. There could still never have been companies like Morgan, Stanley until after companies like Ford were developing a need or desire for these service providers to exist. Wealth is always traceable back to natural resources, whether renewable or not.
Broken_Hippo 10y ago
Plus mechanics, janitors, foodservice folks, truck drivers, Folks handling supplies, and folks moving stuff from one part of the plant to another. Heck, one of the Subaru plants in Lafayette, Indiana, employed multiple people to park new cars. Yup, they drove them from the line to an assigned space in the parking lot. Plus management and inspectors and so on.

by hawski 10y ago

bluedino 10y ago

>> For me 200k employed at Ford seem reasonable. On top of this think of how much work they have contractors doing that don't count towards the 200k

fuzzfactor 10y ago
The fundamental difference with Ford. Even though most of the Ford employees are not devoting their full effort toward physically adding value to natural-resource-derived materials, some of them are, that's where the wealth is generated and the reason money comes in. At a company with none of these type employees generating the profits, wealth originates from markets, not materials themselves. Ford may appear to be a bureaucracy (because it is), but it is not a pure bureaucracy. The non-material companies CAN be operated as pure bureaucracies, and the more pure, the greater degree that success comes from streamlined and efficient bureaucratic processes. Companies like Ford might also need to have as streamlined and efficient bureaucratic processes as possible (simply because many types of bureaucracy can often be a dead weight). For that reason, either type of company might also profit most when the smallest amount of bureaucracy actually is imposed on the fraction of employees who are devoting their full effort toward adding value, whether it is through materials processing, data processing, etc. Even though facebook and Google might be making a profit on every piece of hardware they are involved in, that is not where significant amounts of their money comes from. They are huge but it didn't come from them creating wealth from scratch. Market-dependence of course applies to either type of employment organization, but there are extremely different weightings between capital markets, materials markets, and sales markets between such diverse industries, depending on where the money is coming from at the time. Ford & Morgan, Stanley also are large and successful companies that were founded before most anybody living was ever born. Which is also huge, but everybody knows that. There could still never have been companies like Morgan, Stanley until after companies like Ford were developing a need or desire for these service providers to exist. Wealth is always traceable back to natural resources, whether renewable or not.

Broken_Hippo 10y ago

Plus mechanics, janitors, foodservice folks, truck drivers, Folks handling supplies, and folks moving stuff from one part of the plant to another. Heck, one of the Subaru plants in Lafayette, Indiana, employed multiple people to park new cars. Yup, they drove them from the line to an assigned space in the parking lot. Plus management and inspectors and so on.