A Ford Worker's Point of View - Part 1

I have worked for Ford for over 16 years. What has been reported in the news has been quite bothersome at times and of late a little promising. I'd like to put some things that have been reported to rest, and provide information that may surprise you.

I started out on the assembly line. I took the Apprenticeship test and made the cut for 29 places that were open at the time. I am now a Journeyman Toolmaker and a Tooling Layout Inspector. So I have worked on the line building vehicles, in maintenance maintaining and reparing equipment and tooling, as well as being involved in tooling change overs (changing tooling for a new vehicle) and new vehicle launches, and now I am in the Quality department.

In this series of hubs I will provide some perspective and information from the point of one of the people the news is reporting on, and many complain about, and provide insight on some realities that reporters either don't seem to believe or would rather not report.

In this hub I am going to hit on the magical $73 - $75 per hour that we are reported to earn in total compensation. I am not an authority on business and don't pretend to be, but when your employer says in writing "Here is how much we compensated you last year including your benefits, which cost this much" I have to believe that the company is not sugar coating how much they paid me.

Every year we get a statement of earnings for the previous year. This is unique to each employee. Contained in this report is actual wages paid, cost of healthcare benefits, life insurance, disability, lay-off, etc. When all these figures are added up and divided by 2,080 working hours in a year the math works out to about $37 per hour for the assembly line workers. This is hourly wage plus healthcare and other benefits. If you want to throw in a $10,400 fudge factor for incidentals and unaccounted for "anything" then that is only another $5 per hour for total compensation and would take the figure to $42 per hour, but again this is for hypothetical costs beyond the annual earnings statement.

So where did the $75 figure come from? I have no clue. Ford's own report to their employees do not include figures that add up to this amount, and if anyone wanted to complain about it you would think it would be Ford.

Ford did publish this chart for the meetings they had with Congress, and it is also available at their media.ford.com website...

In this Appendix, Ford shows a total cost of $71 before the VEBA takes affect. $12 of that is under "All Other" as to the source of the cost. I have no idea what "All Other" is after Wages and Wage Related, which I would assume is our benefits. I believe Legacy costs are the retirement costs to former employees and widowed spouses.

This Appendix no longer applies as we have renegotiated and signed a new agreement with more concessions that change the whole playing field. Our labor costs will now be in line with Toyota's and Honda's, even though according to our statements from the company we already were. I think this will make a lot of people happy.

As I live in the North where labor wages are typically higher than in the South I hope this action doesn't set a precedence where all Northern companies will require wages to meet corresponding industry wages in the South. This would be a race to the bottom, where it seems a lot of companies are striving to go. If this does happen it will kind of be like "wage fixing" where only one wage is paid for certain work.

This will eliminate better workers being paid for performing better, which used to be a backbone in this country. Being able to get a better wage at another company for doing a similar job, but performing it at a better level, used to be how people worked their way up. I fear this will be gone.