Biting Every Hand That Feeds You
Hi Friends!
5 years ago, if you were to ask anyone to name what they thought were the most reliable companies in the world, Microsoft, Amazon, Adobe and GoDaddy would almost assuredly be mentioned somewhere near the top of virtually everyone’s list. These were companies with products that almost never failed and if there was ever an issue, customer support was prompt, competent and accessible.
Over the last 12 to 18 months or so, there’s been a noticeable turn with all four of these American organizations. Adobe’s UI has gone from intuitive to disastrous, GoDaddy’s customer support has gone from competent and quick to messy and disorganized, Microsoft products basically never work correctly at all anymore and just a few weeks ago, a simple DNS error caused the failure Amazon’s AWS servers, leading to one of the largest worldwide internet crashes in recent history.
On the homefront, I spend nearly 2 hours per day on average on the phone sitting on hold (or sitting in some useless chat waiting room) or outright arguing with somebody over some product that is crucial to our business (and probably just about every other business in this country) that is not delivering in a usable capacity like it should.
Aside from being staple American institutions, these four companies have something else significant in common: they are basically all near the top of the list of companies who outsource or bring in the most non-US workers and this trend has accelerated tremendously in the last 18 months.
Let’s break down exactly what this means for my business (or businesses like mine, our clients, etc).
Say for the sake of the easiest math imaginable, that my hourly wage is $100.
If I’m spending 2 hours dealing with something broken every single working day, this means that I’m losing 10 hours of productivity per week and it’s costing me $1,000 for my trouble.
$1,000 a week for 52 weeks a year is $52,000.
This is what it costs for me just to sit on the phone not doing anything and not being able to work on other stuff that actually pays me. This obviously doesn’t even include the work that my people can’t do, because products that they need in order to be able to do their jobs are broken too. I still have to pay them and I’m not being reimbursed for the performance (or lack thereof) of these products that we rely on in order to essentially stay in business and I’m hearing from basically everywhere that this is incredibly common and that it is a severely significant drain on their small businesses for certain too.
Anyway…..
Obviously, this is an automotive newsletter, so how exactly does this relate to cars?
Earlier this week, Ford CEO Jim Farley went on record regarding 5,000 six figure mechanic jobs that they can’t seem to figure out how to fill. As soon as I read this (and a whole bunch of you sent me emails asking my opinion on it), a bunch of red flags started to shoot up. We’ve seen this before.
For those not familiar with the term sham recruitment (or perfunctory recruitment as it’s sometimes referred), it’s a practice where a company will go out in the world and advertise employment opportunities in the most obscure places they possibly can in order to go back to the government and then claim that the required talent pool doesn’t exist, so that they can justify bringing in foreign workers or outsourcing the jobs entirely. The reason companies do this is not because they can’t actually find what they need here in this country, but because they are deliberately looking to take advantage of cheaper labor from outside the US. It’s a means of undercutting skilled American labor to save a buck elsewhere, it screws US workers and it sacrifices quality significantly. This to me immediately looked like what Farley was doing, but on a much larger stage and much more in the open. Fords got a real, recent history of stuff like this too.
Settled in late 2021, Ford was on the bad end of a lawsuit where they were accused of discriminating against engineers – specifically, older engineers in the US and Canada and was ordered to pay $10.5 million in damages as a result (IE they went out of their way to get rid of more experienced, probably more expensive engineers in order to cut costs and they violated the law and the process of doing this).
In 2022, Ford Motor Company announced a new engineering center based outside of Mexico City. They touted a $260 million investment there.
In 2023, they announced wide sweeping layoffs of US and Canadian engineers.
There’s a clear pattern of behavior within Ford Motor Company that says that American workers are irrelevant and that they have no interest in actually cultivating anything here. I absolutely suspect that they do have 5,000 jobs available, but Farley’s statement appears to be is another example of corporate sleight of hand were they win and everyone else doesn’t.
There’s real consequences for consumers as a result of this behavior as well.
In July of 2025, it was announced that Ford Motor Company had set the record for the most amount of recalls for single calendar year in automotive history (again in July….). Additionally, they’ve beaten the previous mark (set my General Motors in 2013) by nearly double. This was also more than the next five auto manufacturers issued combined. Meanwhile, the average price of a new automobile has now crossed the $50,000 line. Prices are going up, quality is going down, everyone’s getting taken advantage of and people like Farley are gaslighting American workers in the process of doing it.
What cost cutting like this ultimately breaks down to is a non-governmental tax being levied by big business onto consumers and smaller businesses. They save a couple of dollars here and there, but in turn, everyone else gets poor design, lower quality products and all the hassles (and real-world costs) associated with dealing with all of it (and don’t even get me started on the outrageous failure rates that automotive restoration and repair facilities are dealing with on parts right now. This is a real problem that nearly all of my clients that fit this mold are dealing with currently). Everything costs more for us, because they don’t want to pay for the right people to do jobs properly. End of story.
Ford used to say that quality was job number one. It’s clear that cutting cost and sub $0.10 gains here and there on stock is actually what drives the brand now.
Additionally, this also speaks to an incredibly unfair standard that has been set for young people in this country. We demand that they go into tens of thousands (sometimes hundreds of thousands) of dollars of debt at the age of 18 in order to go through an institution that promises them not only the means to pay those loans back, but that they will get a good job on the other side, which will provide them with a high quality of life, opportunities to succeed and the ability to be secure.
What moves like this tell them is that there’s no point. Why bother going through the process and spending all the money if all it’s going to happen when they do it is that America’s core employment structure is going to tell them that they have no skills and then give those opportunities to somebody else (who clearly doesn’t have skills), all because they will do it a little bit cheaper? We can’t ask these young people to support American brands or get involved in things like automotive enthusiasm if we’re not giving them the path to be able to afford these products in the first place, secondly, that the reason they can’t afford to enjoy the same things that every generation that is visible to them has enjoyed thoroughly is because they just aren’t good enough. What would you do?
They went to our schools, our churches, our institutional learning facilities and we want to call them incompetent and/or lazy?
This kind of activity is a blatant slap in the face to virtually everybody in the United States except for people like Farley and we as Americans absolutely have to say enough is enough. The tech industry has been completely out of control with this for a long time now. Clearly, automotive is not far behind and it’s got to stop.
Mark my words, this is going to be the definitive issue in the 2026 midterm elections. Whichever party figures out how to better navigate this (and I expect both parties to try to run away from confronting this initially) is going to clean the other out as a result. This country cannot continue to be exceptional, if we don’t cultivate and then employ our own exceptional people. Not only is this not doing this completely irresponsible socially, but it’s likely also a national security risk.
That’s it for this week……
Darin Roberge