Originally Posted by Iain Mac

Everyone seems to be forgetting that Ford is a worldwide organisation, not a British one. It's also the only major US automaker that didn't take government money a few years ago or seek protection from creditors.

They certainly do less here than they used to and that withdrawal might or might not continue. The reality is that they sell their vehicles all over the world and can build them pretty much anywhere so they look at the same factors as any other business:
Availability of land, facilities, raw materials, component suppliers, etc.
How close they will be to the market for their vehicles.
Quality and flexibility of the available workforce.
Taxation and other operating costs for a particular location.

Whether we like it or not, we are pricing ourselves out of lots of work here and, as long as the leaders of the unions are encouraging their members to walk out in pursuit of more money, multinationals can't be blamed for looking elsewhere, or do you think that someone sitting in Detroit doesn't consider industrial relations threats when making an investment or closure decision?

The fact that their striking union members lose pay while the officials continue to get full pay tells me all I need to know about their "leadership".

Where I think Ford and a lot of other employers have gone wrong is their obsession with graduate recruitment. They take lots of graduates in, move them around the organisation and lose more than they keep, while ignoring experienced candidates who actually WANT to work for them rather than just get the name on their CV.