John Deere announces mass layoffs in Midwest amid production shift to Mexico | Hacker News Reader

John Deere announces mass layoffs in Midwest amid production shift to Mexico

foxbusiness.com

37 pointsthunderbong16 comments

It is such a shame when a once venerable company is taken over by MBA types who only focus on the next quarter. I have not checked, but I'm guessing they're currently showing massive profits, probably doing stock buybacks, converting as much as they can into subscription services, and cutting R&D jobs as well as domestic manufacturing jobs? It's always the same story. In less than a decade they will be begging the taxpayers for a bailout when it all comes crashing down after the current management pulls the cord on their golden parachutes.

The silver lining is that this opens the door for competitors. Is International Harvester still around?

Fendt, owned by Agco, is sharing the first place in quality and innovation for tractors. Agco is also an American company, but so far seems to be thinking and acting for the long term. May they not revert to the mean...

What can we do to optimize businesses to consider the long term and actually serve their customers and other stakeholders, not just making stock price go up?

There is an economic model where workers own the means of production. But people tend to lose their minds about that.

No they don't.

It is called a cooperative and is working today

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative

People loose their minds with the concept of forcefully transfering all companies to this model, controlled by one political party.

Rarely works out. There's a middle ground between socialist style co-ops and extreme capitalist greed.

See: Costco

Literally a quote from the article:

> The company recently trimmed its annual profit forecast for the second time and projected steeper declines in sales of large agricultural equipment.

You compare economies where one gives full rights to workers vs another that simply doesn't. No wonder labor cost is lower elsewhere. Also in the US we had slaves. Now these slaves are called different names, and work elsewhere.

Oh BTW the 2nd in rank, Case New Holland did exactly the same.

What will be left to produce in the United States? I have a negative feeling about the opportunity leaving the country, from white collar to blue collar. Part of the problem is that the dollar is way too strong.

Honestly the problem is the standard of living of our workers is “too high”. Obviously that’s a good thing compared to some factory worker in Asia that works 12 hour days and then goes to sleep on a floor with 12 other people in the same room but if the American populace will not shell out for the pricier American goods then there really are no good solutions.

music

movies

microcode (software)

high-speed pizza delivery

Why is it always the silliest predictions in sci-fi books that come true?

Overall, the productivity numbers in US have been pretty robustly growing - but there is a multi-decade tendency for this to be achieved by raising the prod/employee. In other words, it's achieved either by reducing headcount to do the same thing, or increasing the output per person. The "low hanging fruit" was all done decades ago, jobs where you cant really automate your way out and need cheap labor. It's inevitably climbing into more and more technical employees, and as you not the relative strength in the dollar makes this pretty compelling.

They've been aggressively hiring H1B in their Iowa location.

Sounds like John Deere is asking for some disruption.

Plug in monitors to their ECAMS and build a drop in replacement.

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