Chapter 35: Shell Games
The first time you see the game where a man puts a pea under one of three walnut-halfs, moves them around and challenges people to bet on which shell the pea is under, you think you can pick the right shell. You cant. Its a fools bet because the pea isnt under any of the shells. Its in the palm of the shell-shufflers hand. He knows the real rules of the game. You only think that you know them.
Many GSR employees in the Design Center were coming around to the view that Ford was running a shell game on them with the pay-for-performance system and the performance review system it was based on.
The distrust started long before then with a takeaway of the annual improvement factor, which had given all salaried employees a 3% raise every year. Most people thought it was a good idea at the time because the company said the money would go into higher merit increases. The better you did your job the more money you could get. But so few people got merit increases that equaled what they would have gotten with the addition of the annual improvement factor and so few people got them annually, that they began to question then new system.
We could still keep up with the cost of living regardless of how small a raise we got or when we got it because the company gave us a cost of living allowance. That was a quarterly check based on the federal governments consumer price index. Then the company said they were going to do something for us by rolling the cost of living checks into our base pay. Most employees were thrilled with their first checks under the new system because it boosted their semi-monthly checks appreciably. Disillusionment set in again when the cost of living went up and our checks stayed the same.
Ford neutralized that potential stink bomb by announcing a profit sharing plan. Everybody understood the formula. If the company made a profit the troops would get a proportional share of it. The first profit sharing checks were huge. The next year they were smaller, although Ford made more money. I couldnt find anyone who understood that formula.
The years after that are a blur because the formula kept changing. We got less profit sharing one year because Ford of Europe made money and North American Operations didnt. Another year we got less profit sharing because Ford of Europe didnt make money although NAO did
Well, NAO did make money but it wasnt a profit because the company had to invest so much money in real estate. The profits came from Ford Credit. Fords financial operations didnt count.
For Salaried Design Center employees none of those formulas reflected what we did from year to year to make money of Ford. We did most of the work that won the 93 Probe Motor Trends Car of the Year award in 1988 and 89. We did the work that made the Mustang Motor Trends 1994 Car of the Year in 90 and 91. That award had nothing to do with whether the car made money. The important thing is that it lent prestige to the company, which in turn, helped the company make money. And what can any of the salaried workers do about executive marketing decisions that produced cars the market didnt want or failed to produce cars that the market did want?
Ford didnt need another Blue Ribbon process to find out why Design Center morale was falling to new lows. We got another one anyway. It was called the Design Center Renewal Process. It was supposed to identify GSR concerns and management was supposed to give them honest consideration. Only the people hadnt been the Design Center long enough to remember how Blue Ribbon started took it seriously. Many of us didnt even bother to go through the motions.
In late March 1992 Ford tried to run another shell game with a plumb foreign assignment and got caught with the pea in its palm.
Job openings anywhere in the company were supposed to be posted. Anyone who met the requirements was supposed to get fair consideration for the position. The fact that job openings hadnt been posted was one of the GSR sore spots that the company could address right away. So, when Toshi Sato asked for a modeler in Japan to work with Larry Paluschak a Sculptor-Modeler with eight years of experience Joe Seibold posted the opening on a wall in the clay modelers back room.
Toshi specifically asked for a Master Modeler. Everyone gathered around the posting knew what that requirement meant because they knew that many Sculptors were capable of doing anything they could do. Indeed, it was customary for directors to give foreign assignments to Sculptor-Modelers they intended to promote to Master. Charles Purnell was an exception to that rule. All four of Fords Sculptors were in Joe Seibolds studio and all of us were gathered around Toshis posting.
The black modelers didnt have to utter a word. Everyone could see the intended message and Bill Wight stated it bluntly.
Thats just like saying black people need not apply.
A couple of white modelers said, Yeah! The rest knitted their eyebrows while nodding their heads in agreement, dropped their jaws and shook their heads in disbelief or stood slack-jawed and bug-eyed in shock. Only the newest modelers failed to give one of these signs that he read the message the same way Bill Wight read it.
Nobody accused Bill of turning the job posting into a racial issue the way some of them who attended the Mustang/Interiors integrity meeting accused me of doing with the black guy at the white guys country club. Some of them probably flashed back to that episode with a new appreciation of where I was coming from and why the integrity issue I posed had a real-world impact on them.
Yes, the job posting did exclude Calvin, Purnell, Leak and me because none of us belonged to the all-white Master Modeler club. Maybe it was aimed at excluding only one of us. But to do it discretely Toshi had to exclude all of Fords Sculptor-Modelers.
Everyone in that group saw that the job posting issue went beyond race. Women and Jews need not have applied. Vietnam veterans need not have applied. The game was rigged. That was the essential point. If it could be rigged against one group it could be rigged against another group with a fancy shuffling of words and statistics to give it a legitimate appearance.
Protests form angry Sculptors poured into Personnel. Rather than admitting that anything was wrong with Toshis request for another modeler, Toshi decided that he didnt need another modeler. Rather than admit that something was wrong with his requirement for a Master Modeler, he promoted Larry Paluschak.
News of Paluschaks promotion to Master Modeler began as a rumor. It was hard to believe that Ford would do anything so foolish for several reasons. Master Modelers were promoted several at a time. Paluschak had been a clay modeler for only eight years and nobody in over a generation had made it to the top in less than ten years. Ford had at least half a dozen Sculptors with better objective qualifications and all of us were at least ten years older than Paluschak. The age difference gave all of us standing to file a credible age discrimination lawsuit against Ford.
When the promotion list came out on April 3, 1992, Paluschaks name was on it along with Bill Wight, Howard Thompson, Al Sanson, Ed Jubeck and Chuck Lukas. Bill Wight started his modeling career when I did in 1966. He got the same poison pill offer I got in 68 and turned it down for the same reason. Fred Hodely brought him back in 69 with a salary that wouldnt hurt his prospects for advancement, although he lost three years of seniority. Howard and Al began their clay modeling careers when I returned to Ford in 77, seven years before Paluschak entered Fords clay modeling school. Chuck Lukas and Ed Jubick, had been Sculptors for longer than that.
None of the women who began modeling before Larry Paluschak did were still modelers. Therefore, none of them had legal standing to file a sex discrimination claim, although sex discrimination was the reason they were no longer clay modelers. Ford had thus dodged a hail of litigation bullets with effective new methods of practicing illegal discrimination and some clever retroactive shell shuffling.
One glaring mistake on the April promotion list was the absence of black Master Modelers. Until this moment in the history of Ford Motor Co. no black modeler could argue that race had anything to do with our failure to make it into the Master Modeler club. Objective standards did not exist to guarantee that anyone would ever make it. You cant meet standards that dont exist. The best you could do was to compare the qualifications that distinguished the modelers who made it to the top of the profession in the past from the ones who didnt.
You could go only so far with that because the record was not consistent and the five Supervisors charged with making the decisions were bound by an oath of confidentiality not to reveal whom they voted for. A Director or someone in Personnel could also veto their votes in favor of their favorite candidates. Consequentially, no one outside of the decision-making process could know what factors determined who made the final list. In Paluschaks case, it could have been the majority of Supervisors or it could have been Toshi, with the Supervisors and Personnel merely rubber-stamping Toshis choice.
We knew that some men became Master Modelers solely because of personal favors they did for their Directors. Some, like Phil Hussar, Dave Hackett, and Mike Wyman made it when they did because they were able to show their exceptional talent to influential people who wanted young Masters to replace retiring old ones. Some became Masters after a long string of Os. Some made it after one or two Os following a string of EPs. Some made it on the strength of EPs alone if the string was long enough and enough Supervisors agreed that he had what it took to do the job. Being an outstanding clay modeler didnt necessarily give you all qualities that a Master Modeler was supposed to have.
If Larry Paluschak had those qualities, only Joe Seibold, who was with him in Japan for four years, knew about them. By this time all of the former Clay Modeling Managers had either retired or been demoted. Ford had busted Benny Barbara down to a grade-8 coordinator with no one to supervise and nothing to coordinate. Paluschak had never worked for Greg Arceri. He hadnt worked for Frank DeBono, either. If he had worked with Gerry Folgman it could not have been for more than six months. When I was with Paluschak in Rod Leightons studio he had been in the profession for only two years and in the studio for less than one. He spent the next six years in Japan. With those credentials he should not have even been in the pool of candidates.
Many white modelers saw the implications and urged the black models to file a race discrimination lawsuit. Not all of these modelers cared whether Ford promoted an African-American to Master. But all of them saw that all of us were more qualified for the position than Larry Paluschak. And they saw how such a lawsuit would put pressure on Ford to take the mystery and chicanery or of its performance reviews and promotional practices. With Jubick, Sanson, Thompson and Lucas on the promotion list they thought that Ford had cut their legs from under them in arguing age discrimination. They saw age discrimination as the key issue, an issue that struck Fords white male salaried workers the hardest.
George Wood, a white, fifty-something Sculptor, thought differently.
The black modelers realized that Ford would soon recognize the tactical error it made and promote one of us to exclude the others. We moved swiftly to make our own documentation of the omission outside of Fords ability to manipulate the data and to objectify the legal threat that would force the promotion and show it for what it was.
Our preemptive strike consisted of four individual letters to the Michigan Department of Civil Rights. To show that we were acting in a unified front, I typed all of the letters on the same keyboard using the identical format and mailed them.
We didnt stop there.
Charles Purnell organized a meeting at his house for every black salaried employee we knew in the Design Center. The black modelers issues were the same as theirs, only they didnt have a Larry Paluschak to make it obvious. Whatever we did or failed to do would affect them.
Purnell arranged for a Personnel expert from another Fortune 500 company to advise us on our strategy. She told us that before we did anything else we had to make sure that our ducks were in a row; that we separated fact from suspicion and documented enough facts to clearly illustrated the merit of our case.
Companies like Ford rarely practiced discrimination crudely and openly. Our personnel advisor told us that the EEOC was the last place we wanted to go because it routinely dismissed any case that wasnt narrowly defined and blatantly illegal on its face. We suspected as much from the Regan and Bush holdovers running the bureaucracy, Thats why we started our campaign with the Michigan Department of Civil Rights. She told us that the place to go was the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Program. The OFCCP took all complaints of illegal discrimination in the workplace seriously and investigated them.
None of us at the meeting had ever heard of the OFCCP. From what our advisor told us about it, we were certain to get a fair hearing and we had no doubt that a fair hearing would decide the case in our favor. Ford could not get away with excluding three black modelers by promoting one and arguing that one-quarter of its black modelers were Master Modelers. It could not then uses the overrepresentation of blacks at the top of their modeling profession to argue that it did not practice racial discrimination in automotive design.
Like most educated, all-black groups Ive been involved with in a serious matter, this one was hopelessly divided. Some of the older ones were afraid of rocking the boat near the end of their careers. Some of the younger ones thought that racial discrimination was not a problem for anyone in the 90 who did their jobs well. Calvin told his story of being hired and promoted at Ford, Purnell told his. I told mine. Leak should have told his. Out of all the modelers Fore hired it hired him, he was he last one promoted to Sculptor and the lowest paid along with Leonard Gross, Fords only remaining Jewish modeler.
We drew up a list of black modelers we knew that Ford hired but had been laid-off and were never heard from again and those who were brought in as temps and never hired. We presented other statistical information and a long witness lists to back up what we couldnt document. When we finished, Richard Porter, whose wife had won a lawsuit against Ford, suggested that we take our complaint and our supporting evidence to Ford Personnel in a show of good faith. Calvin, Purnell and I countered that the company would use it against us.
Most people in the group thought that my example of how the company would use the promotion of one black modeler to Master to argue that a quarter of us were Masters was absurd.
Calvin had already said that Ford would classify Mel Edwards and Andy Walker, pay grade-3 clay maintenance men, as clay modelers to pad the number of black modelers on its payroll to six. He said that Ford would use the fact that their salary was in the fourth quarter of their pay grade to argue that a third of the black modelers were in the fourth quarter of their pay grade. I had already said that the company would use Cals third quarter salary in addition to Mel and Andys fourth quarter salary to argue that half of the modelers were over the midpoint of their pay grade. For me to then say that Ford was going to promote one of us to Master and say that a quarter of us were Masters sounded like a contradiction.
It was a contradiction. That didnt mean Ford would present it that way. We knew what the data meant. People outside of the Design Center didnt. Depending on how Ford presented the data, it could make any argument in its favor sound reasonable. That was the point.
Everybody eventually got it but only half of the group bought it. The other half still believed that taking our argument to the company before taking it to the OFCCP was the best way to go. Richard Porter and his supporters believed that if we presented our case to the company like civilized human beings, the company might respond in kind and no confrontation would be necessary.
Calvin, Purnell and I knew that the company was not going to respond in kind. Leak wasnt sure. He hadnt dealt with Ford as long as we had. He hadnt seen the patterns enough times to recognize them, to predict with certainty what Ford would do next or to understand how we could predict what Ford would do next. He didnt believe we could. He thought that we should give the company the benefit of the doubt. We had no doubt that doing so would give the company all the ammunition it needed to blow us away. We had no doubt that it would if it could.
We got the OFCCP forms, filled them out and sent them in without Leaks signature. We accepted his decision, which he later regretted. At the time it was understandable. He and his wife had recently adopted two little girls. Soon afterward, his wife contracted cancer. The disease progressed rapidly. She lost one of her legs. The young girls needed special attention and Leaks job leader was giving him a hard time about being away from the job too much. He didnt need any more stress.
After we sent our complaint to the OFCCP something strange happened. People started coming up to us asking if the black modelers had filed a race discrimination lawsuit against Ford with the EEOC. I got it from three modelers a woman in Personnel and the consultant from California who advised Ford on the structure of the Steering Committee and the Blue Ribbon Committee, and on the way to conduct meetings. The strange thing wasnt that they asked the question. The strange thing was the way they looked at me when I told them we hadnt. They looked at me as if to say, why are you lying? I know that you went to the EEOC.
A few days after those mysterious encounters I called Maxie Cason of the Michigan Department of Civil Rights. He told me that his department was being dismantled and things there were in a state of chaos. He told me that neither the Michigan Department of Civil Rights nor the OFCCP was handing illegal discrimination complaints any longer. He said we had to go to the Federal Building in downtown Detroit and fill out the appropriate forms with the EEOC.
The next day I got a letter from the EEOC telling me what Maxi told me over the telephone. Another mystery solved
.
Somebody with a lot of juice in the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was giving Ford advanced notice of our illegal discrimination charges. There was no other way Ford could have known before we knew that the EEOC would handle them. Indeed, we hadnt yet filed our official complaints with the EEOC and from Maxis description of what was happening in his department, he didnt know about the change until the day he got our letters.
This meant that Ford knew what was in the letters and had time to adjust its records in anticipation of what we would allege in our EEOC complaints. We had to secure the forms immediately and move swiftly to fill them out and submit them so that Ford could not claim it promoted one of us to Master prior to our complaints. It wasnt going to be easy for Ford to manipulate the facts and figures accompanying the promotion to its advantage. We knew that the company had experts working overtime to do just that, so Calvin took the bull by the horns, gathered up the forms and delivered them to the EEOC office in person.
The idea that only one of us was going to be promoted rankled all of us. Although Calvin, Purnell and I put fourth solid individual cases for why we should have been on the promotion list it was going to be harder for Purnell to show why he should replace anyone but Larry Paluschak on the six-man list.
Calvin had 26 years of unbroken seniority with Ford, a long, unbroken string of EPs that would have been Os if he had been white. Purnell had 8 more years of unbroken seniority than I had but our total years of modeling experience were equal. He had splendid foreign service credentials that neither Calvin nor I had but I had more EPs than Purnell had and I was Fords only black modeler to ever get an O. My last two performance reviews were Os. Purnells last two performance reviews were Es. If I hadnt waged the campaign I waged in 88, I would have gotten an E instead of an O. I would never have had the chance to earn my second O in Components, Concepts and Mustang. I would not have had the documentation show how PRs didnt tell the whole story.
If Purnell had been white he would have gotten an O for what he did in Germany. If Greg Arceri or Joe Seibold had been his Supervisor when he got back he certainly would have gotten a higher PR than an E. They would have given him an opportunity to show what he could do without seeing his work through the lens of his undeserved Es. This is not speculation, as you will see in the next chapter. An EEOC investigation would have uncovered these things.
While we were waiting for the investigation to begin we had work to do that couldnt wait.
The new Taurus had bad surface flaws in the fender and door. The door was a particular problem since we had to use the same doors on the station wagon, which hadnt been designed yet. Dave Hackett got the job of leading the modeling of the wagon in another studio. Because the job was presumed to be only an extension of what had already been approved, Joe gave him only one modeler to help him. He picked me.
I wouldnt know why Joe picked me to work with Hackett on the wagon for another two years when I saw an evaluation report Hackett made on me before we did the wagon. On a sale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the best, he rated me no higher than 3 in any category, including creativity, job knowledge and quality. Dennis Phinney rated me 5 in all of those categories. In retrospect it appears that Joe thought Hackett was wrong about me and paring me with him was a good way for both of them to find out. In other words, Joe was testing Hackett, not me.
The full surface of the car had been milled from the rear edge of the front doors forward. Hackett took the passenger side. I took the driver side. We started by putting in the wagon portion of the vehicle and trying to blend it into the door. The door terminated in a way that drove the body side highlights in the wrong direction. Hackett tried to work around it and came up with brilliant solutions that might have squeaked by if they hadnt changed Dug Gafgas design so radically.
I saw a chance to keep Dugs design and to fix the worst surface flaws in the base model at the same time.
I scarped away the portion of the front door that was driving the bad highlights behind it. I showed Hackett what I did and told him why I did it. The result spoke for itself. Hackett agreed that the door on the sedan need to be fixed anyway and by making the change on the wagon we might be able to force a re-evaluation of the sedan door. He went to work on bringing his body side though the way it had to go and while we were at it, we fixed the bad highlight on the fender. When we were finished both sides looked great.
The wagon did force a change in the sedan door. The fender fix would come later on a partial buck. I made the fix.
Back in the main studio Purnell was continuing to turn out magnificent clay model wheels. However, the surface scans that the experts did with the latest and greatest PDMS machine for engineering studies and factory-tooling dies didnt look like the models.
Dennis Phinney had the same problem with the interior parts he modeled. The sections he cut from the computer-modeled printouts missed critical surface changes that described the surface mathematically and blended them into points that didnt. I could imagine the math modelers curvature plots showing perfect continuity and a deviation plotter that showed a match to the scan to within three or four decimal places of a millimeter. I didnt know at the time that such a deviation plotter was indeed being used. I just couldnt think of another way the information could come back to us as inaccurately as it did.
The scan operator, no doubt, got high marks for turning out many scans quickly and the math modeler, no doubt, got high marks for connecting the dots and his patches perfectly. But neither of them knew what they needed to know to do their jobs right the first time. They had to do them repeatedly. They never got the wheels right and I could see that they were never going to. They just didnt have the aesthetic sensitivity to see what had to be done or the modeling background to do it.
I took the initiative to learn how to use then new PDMS machine and scan the wheels the way they had to be scanned to pick up the subtle contours that made Purnells models outstanding.
The manufacturers manual was fiendishly difficult to follow. It referred to parts on the machine that I couldnt identify and it had no pictures and no context clues to tell me what they were. I had to track down the owner of the company in Indiana, who was also the inventor of the machine, and bring him into the studio to show me what his manual didnt. Joe Seibold approved my plan and arranged for the PDMS man to pick up a visitors ID badge in the lobby and for me to meet him there and escort him to the studio.
The day before the PDMS man arrived I stepped out of the studio into the main corridor and a back female in her early twenties accosted me and sternly demanded that I show her my badge. I needed the badge to unlock the door that let me in the building. I kept it in my wallet so I wouldnt forget it. The young woman was wearing a temporary badge on her vest pocket. I could see that her name was Tammy and that she was dead serious. My first instinct was to tell her what I told the young white guy I didnt know who demanded to see my ID badge the day before. I told him, If you dont know who I am, you dont belong here. Id like to think that I didnt also tell him to go fuck himself, but I probably did.
That might be why I decided to go easier on Tammy.
I told her who I was. I told her that my badge was in my wallet and why I kept it there, but I didnt show it to her. She should have known by the clay on my shoes and the fact that I had just come out of the Taurus studio that I belonged in the building. Her tone and body language reminded me of the Dearborn cop who thought I looked suspicious standing at a bus stop and asked for my ID. A black guy in a white neighborhood looks suspicious only to people with that kind of mindset. They dont have to be white.
I let Tammy explain that she challenged me because a Ford memo directed everyone in the Design Center to display their badges at all times and to challenge anyone they didnt know who didnt. I knew that, of course, and I ignored it the way anyone who had been around the Design Center as long as I had ignored all idiotic directives. So many authorized vendors and temps like Tammy were slithering around the place these days that they were a bigger security threat than people who didnt belong in the building.
Indeed, the people who belonged in the building were as big a security threat as the people who didnt. People leaving Ford for other auto companies took design and engineering secrets with them. To keep design professionals from stealing whole boxes of X-acto knife blades, Andy Walker had to open every box he ordered and mix different kinds of blades together. He had to do the same thing with straight pins just to make sure we had enough of them on hand. Spay paint cans walked out of the building every day. The biggest thief I knew of was a Director. I saw him loading his truck with the choicest planks of finished wood from the Wood Shop in plain view of a dozen other witnesses.
When I was at Roush, a Ford executive leaked preliminary sketches of the new Mustang to an auto magazine. A petty thief, that everyone figured out had to be a janitor and many people thought was a black guy in the engineering area they didnt know, turned out to be a white guy in the design studio they thought they knew. He wasnt our young, skinny, unkempt janitor who always seemed to be short of money. He was a neat, stable, older guy, who had recently gotten married. He always kept his badge on prominent display.
My first encounter with Tammy did not end amicably.
The next day Joe Seibold told me that the PDMS expert was waiting for me in the lobby. When I got there I learned what Tammys temp job was. She was the receptionist.
This time I had to show Tammy my badge but she gave the PDMS man such a hard time with his credentials that it looked for a while that she wasnt going to give him a visitors badge to enter the studio. She had the name of his company but she had his sons name. She grilled both of us on his authorization to be there and didnt give him the visitors badge until she called the studio to confirm that what we told her was true. The man got so agitated that I thought he was going to walk out the door.
He was more patient than I would have been. When Tammy reluctantly gave him the badge and the two of us walked to the studio, I apologized to him all the way. He told me to forget it. He had been through that sort of hassle before. I kept thinking about Joan, the receptionist who what there when I first entered the Design Center lobby twenty-six years earlier. Joan knew everybody in the building. She knew how the place functioned and she went the extra mile to make it function as smoothly as possible for everyone she dealt with. The PDMS man would not have had the hassles with her that he had with the new girl. And yes, I did mean to say girl. Tammy had a lot of growing up to do before she could truthfully call herself an adult.
Tammy wasnt alone. I would learn in the next few years that Ford was systematically replacing as many Joans as possible with Tammys as clerks, designers, engineers, modelers, secretaries and receptionists. The Joans were older. They thought more independently. They made more money because they hired in when salaries were going up. The Tammys were younger and more willing to accept whatever the company told them and to run with it. Most of all, they worked hard for smaller salaries and they could be easily replaced by people who were willing to work just as hard for less.
My immediate concern was mastering the new PDMS machine to preserve the integrity of the Taurus/Sable designs and the models. I learned on one of Purnells wheels because it was the most difficult. If I could do the wheel, I could do anything.
It took another visit from the PDMS inventor for me to clear up the cobwebs. This time he brought his son and had no trouble getting in. I scanned all of Purnells wheels the way I mapped the door for Mike Hornis ICEM-Surf expert. I put in twice as many points as our PDMS technicians would put in but I put all of them in the right places so I had to take them only once.
I was finishing my scan of an especially intricate wheel when a product planner walked up and stood next to me mesmerized by the image on my screen. Somehow he got the idea that the machine had created the wheel and he said to me, Isnt it amazing what these machines can make?
I pointed to Charles Purnell a short distance away fine-tuning a wheel with his hands, his brain, his clay modeling tools and his unmistakable professional expertise. I said, Thats the machine that made this wheel.