The executive chair of Ford Motor company called for an end to a strike by US auto workers as it enters its second month, saying that drawn-out walkouts will help Tesla, Toyota and Chinese carmakers and “devastate” local communities across US.
Bill Ford spoke on Monday as members of the United Auto Workers union continued to strike at plants owned by his company, and by General Motors and Stellantis. Last week UAW members began picketing Ford’s most profitable factory, a truck plant in Kentucky.
“This is about the future of the American automobile industry,” Bill Ford said in a livestreamed speech on Monday, in a rare public intervention in the labour dispute. Non-unionised carmakers “Toyota, Honda, Tesla and the others are loving this strike because they know the longer it goes on the better it is for them. They will win, and all of us will lose.”