Why might Ford be shifting some jobs from Mexico to the United States?

Ford is moving production of its 2016 Ford F-650 and F-750 medium-duty trucks to its Ohio Assembly Plant in Avon Lake, near Cleveland, Ohio.  Currently those medium-duty trucks are produced in Mexico. Ford will be investing $168 million in the Avon Lake facility to retool the plant since it is currently set up to produce the Ford E-Series delivery vans (which are currently being phased out in favor of new, more efficient transit vans.)

Questions

1. What reasons could Ford have had to shift production of the medium-duty trucks to Mexico originally?
2. What reasons could Ford have for shifting production of the medium-duty trucks back to the United States now?

Instructor Resources

These resources are provided to give the instructor flexibility for use of Accounting in the Headlines articles in the classroom. The blog posting itself can be assigned via a link to this site OR by distributing the student handout below.  Alternatively, the PowerPoint file below contains a bullet point overview of the article and the discussion questions.  The YouTube video link below is a narration of the blog post article (no discussion questions are included in the YouTube video; those can be assigned separately.)

• Student handout (pdf) (word) (contains entire blog posting + discussion questions)
• PowerPoint file (brief article overview + discussion questions)
• YouTube video (narrated article in shareable YouTube link)

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