The absolutely beautiful reason that I can tell that they still aren't agreeing to Fords concessions is because they in solidarity with new workers that don't even exist yet, are demanding that Fords new battery plants they are building be placed under the same labor agreement they are fighting for.
"The UAW, according to Ford officials, has taken a hard line on requiring the company’s four new battery plants be placed under the terms of the labor agreement."
And surely there won't be a drastic drop in quality when they hire too few workers who have no experience. This will mean delays and recalls on purchases.
Sometimes I can be so "clumsy" with my bags of sand and metal filings around expensive machinery. Can't break tradition though. Gotta always have my bags of lucky dust.
I don't know how Ford does things, but if your process is well documented and controlled new workers can produce just as good a quality. The biggest problem should be just how slow. I can put new wipers on a car - or whatever it is each person is doing, but someone with experience can do things much faster.
And if you rush them, then things go wrong in a hurry. It doesn't matter how much documentation you have if the operator skips steps or plain old makes a mistake.
I've personally blown up thousands of dollars in tooling making stupid mistakes when I was a junior machinist being told we had deadlines to meet. I've seen other guys forget to probe a work offset and crash the machine so badly it needs a spindle rebuild. A press operator can wreck a $100,000 die set if they make even relatively easy mistakes, and if that happens to the wrong tool, it can completely shut down production for months for a repair or rebuild.
If there's a 1 in a million chance that any of those 10,000 employees makes a big, showstopping mistake on a given day, then after 100 days, there's a 63% chance of that event happening.
Ford has the most recalls of any automaker in the US the last like three years running though. So maybe don't buy a new ford from anytime in the last like 5 years either.