In fairness, homes in Detroit can be quite affordable. There are quite a few 2,000 sq. ft. homes listed for <$150,000 that may be 80 years old but are updated with a modern interior look. These would be affordable to a 22-year old factory worker making $80,000 ($40/hr) with no college debt, even if they didn't perfectly optimize their budget.
Good school districts are likely to be less affordable though, but cost of raising children is a whole other can of worms.
I think the parent's point is more that there are so few of those workers that you need seniority for any job security in the first place. The 22-year-olds are the first people getting fired in a scheme like this, and there's not exactly a burgeoning demand for their replacement.
The UAW-Ford contract doesn't allow that, the 1-2 year employees would be fired before the 22 year old employees with 4 years of seniority. We're specifically talking about union jobs (UAW), so the company isn't generally targeting specific workers to fire.
The union has a lot of control over which employees leave during layoffs, and often it's actually the workers with less seniority in the union who are let go. Generally unions negotiate for a "last hired, first fired" situation (youngest employees go first) and often more senior employees have "bumping rights" - if their entire specialization is eliminated, they can move laterally by displacing junior workers. It's also fairly difficult for Ford to individually target the most expensive workers because the UAW does a good job of making sure there's real cause for termination.
UAW's agreement with Ford contains the usual "last hired, first fired" provision on page 80 here[0] in Article VIII §16(c). "Bumping" is part of the agreement on page 79, VIII §13(b).
Perhaps I misunderstood you and you meant that it's hard for workers to get to the "4 year" mark in the first place because Ford can just churn the 1-3 year workers over and over again. The UAW contract also contains a "Preferential Placement Arrangements" clause which gives laid-off workers priority for re-hire whenever Ford is hiring again. Workers can lose their seniority - but there's a bit of a ratchet effect, they have to stay unemployed by Ford for a length of time equal to how long they were employed. So if they've worked there for 2 years, get fired, and are next in line to be rehired 18 months later, they'll enter back in with 3.5 years of seniority from their original date of hire.
Ford had no WARN layoffs[1] between 2012-2018 and only 3 in the past 6 years (affecting 4200 workers in total), so generally it seems that workers are able to achieve top-end wages and full seniority before being laid off.
Yep. It's a difficult needle to thread. Seniority IS important and there really needs to be a way to keep that knowledge. On the other hand, people retire, at some point... If you layoff the last batch of people (no matter how good they were at their job) and replace them with even newer people (in the case of my layoff with my "Team B" in the second most longest job I've had (8 years)). The incoming team at least had more training than our group did which was 2 weeks, they got 3 months. We were meant to be expendable but proved ourself during the pandemic with a massive influx ofwork-from-home installs, while people had quit and burned out from it all.
I still support Unions, even if in the US they're compromised, primarily (IMO) due to Taft-Hartley and the political restrictions placed upon them (mostly about cross-shop/cross-trade organizing, general strikes (sympathy strikes), etc...)
The best part was union leadership informing us the "good news" that there won't be 2 different pay-grades. And at least in the interim we did get a bump to "tier 1" for that time of negotiations while we were there before we were let go.
My point was that we shouldn't pretend "over $40 an hour" for senior staff is generous. A young person would still be better served financially learning a trade than working on the line at Ford.
Good school districts are likely to be less affordable though, but cost of raising children is a whole other can of worms.