Ford expands work from home to 30,000 employees

Ford has realized that, well, many of its employees have been doing very well working from home. All this and more The morning shift for March 18, 2021.

1st team: offer extended to white-collar workers and not blue-collar workers

The funny thing about all of this is that Ford says his plan is a “hybrid” work model, which means I’ll only think about the old Ford Escapes when I read about it. From Chicago Tribune:

It’s a question that occupies the minds of millions of employees who have worked from home last year: will they still be allowed to work remotely (at least for a few days) once the pandemic has faded? On Wednesday, one of the U.S. corporate titans, Ford Motor Co., provided its own answer: It informed about 30,000 of its employees around the world who have worked from home that they can continue to do so indefinitely, with schedules flexible approved by their administrators. Their schedules will become a “hybrid” of the work office: they will travel to work primarily for group meetings and projects best suited for face-to-face interaction.

Some of this seems to try to make employees happy, and some of it seems to be about corporate efficiency. Ford stressed that there will be no need to spend cubicle farms, or crush the soul or not, when he spoke Bloomberg about the switch:

“There are no more cubicle farms,” Jackie Shuk, said in an interview the global director of Ford’s real estate unit. “We try to make him a Ford worker as easy as possible.”

Bloomberg also stressed that this will be for office workers and not for factory workers:

Ford will need to carefully manage perceptions, as it gives flexibility to some employees and not others. The pandemic exposed society’s dependence on the physical presence of blue-collar workers factory floor at the grocery counter. But the idea that white-collar employees log in safely at home, while lower-paid employees risk their health to appear in person, has been an additional source of resentment in an already stratified American economy.

I don’t know if I would necessarily care if other people were trapped in cubicles if I worked on the line, but it’s me.

2nd gear: electric cars do very well … Shared prices

Electric vehicles are still a bit of the car market and as much as they have the promise they offer for the future, what do they do for car companies? Right Now? The answer is that stock values ​​increase, such as Wall Street Journal reports:

After years of regretting that his actions were undervalued, Ford engine Co., General Motors Co., Volkswagen AG and other blue car manufacturers see it sharp rises in stock prices this year while embracing new technology.

Ford has risen 49% so far this year, while GM shares have risen 48%. VW shares rose 55% and even briefly rose 29% in intraday trading one day this week, when the company held a “Power Day” event, saying would build six EV battery factories in Europe alone for the next ten years. VW has also advanced this week SAP SE to become the most valuable value in the German DAX index.

How much do car companies really value for themselves and how much do they value what they do for stock prices? Who could even differentiate?

3rd March: Tesla is sued for failing to appoint a lawyer to stop Elon’s tweets

Tesla thrives on having a public figure like Elon to send endless presumptions on Twitter, so it’s no surprise that the company hasn’t really curbed its account, as a new lawsuit alleges. It seems that the case does not depend on people getting angry at Elon’s bad memes, but he believes his bad Twitter operations are hurting the company’s value, as Business Insider reports:

Elon Musk was able to post “erratic” tweets about Tesla that led to government investigations because the company’s board did not control its CEO, alleges a lawsuit from a Tesla investor.

The board had “consistently failed” in appointing an independent attorney general, investor Chase Gharrity said in his lawsuit. The company lost three CEOs in 2019, he added.

The lawsuit against Musk and the council focuses on how Musk’s comments on Twitter allegedly violated one Liquidation 2018 with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which removed him from the company board and stipulated that his tweets had to be approved in advance by the company.

Shareholders deserve better!

4th Gear: Teslas is too expensive for the UK grant

The advantage of electric vehicles is their quiet operation and the total freedom of gas stations. People also talk a lot about how much money they may or may not save with them. We will soon see the great attraction that really exists in the UK, as the government has just set the price of Teslas with a large subsidy, Bloomberg Green reports:

UK transport authorities on Thursday cut down a bonus on the purchase of cars, vans and electric trucks at £ 2,500 ($ 3,491) from £ 3,000 and lowered the price of models that fall to less than £ 35,000. Although the previous ceiling of less than £ 50,000 meant the majority Variants of model 3 once the aid is obtained, none will be classified according to the new rule.

The UK government has been pressured to do so cover a hole in the country’s finances left by the pandemic. He argues that buyers of more expensive electric vehicles can afford to change combustion engine cars even without the aid, and that the number of models with batteries costing less than £ 35,000 has increased by almost 50% since 2019 .

I get the feeling that people never buy a Tesla for budgetary reasons, but it will be interesting to watch it.

5th Gear: Nikola Partner sells half of his stake

How are things going for Nikola after the whole issue “the head of the company was exposed like a fraud”? It’s not great. Its strategic partner Hanwha, which wanted to supply solar parks, has sold half of its stake in the company, worth about $ 180 million, as Bloomberg reports:

Hanwha, whom Nikola has described as a key partner and strategic investor, plans to sell 11.05 million shares, or 50% of its current stake in the Phoenix-based company, according to a securities statement Wednesday. Hanwha Corp. is the group’s listed shareholding group, a conglomerate that covers financial services, chemicals and solar energy.

The amount to be sold is worth about $ 180 million, according to Nikola’s closing price of $ 16.39. Shares of Nikola fell 3.5 percent to $ 15.82.

[…]

He said Hanwha will supply third-party solar farms with the panels needed to generate electricity for “clean energy” hydrogen production for a planned network of fueling stations in the U.S. Hanwha bought his stake in 2018, two years before Nikola won a publicly traded stock in June through a reverse merger with a special-purpose acquisition company.

I start to wonder if this Nikola thing will work.

Reverse: We turned away from the light of God