The article says nothing about labour prices bringing them down.
How are car companies doing in general?
Timmy, I own 200 shares of Ford (thank God no more than that!) and they've been in a death spiral for years now. I've been banking on them turning it around, and it looks like they may have hit rock-bottom and are starting back. But it comes down to revenues and expenses.
Sales in the US are down. Way down. If not for the European market, Ford would have shown a big loss this year (that's right, they ARE still profitable - barely - across all segments).
You can point a lot of fingers for soft sales: poor innovation, crappy marketing, lousy debt structuring, etc. but the bottom line is people buy cars on quality and reliability. American cars - built by union labor - suffer from quality issues, and just as importantly, from a PERCEPTION of quality issues.
It's true at Ford and GM, and to a lesser extent Chrysler (though that's more German than American now, for all intents and purposes).
So where do you cut costs to preserve your margins and hope for a market realignment? Simple, it's physical plant and employees. Which is why the stock prices react so positively to word of layoffs and shutdowns... because the market knows that it's necessary, even if the UAW doesn't.
