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Chapter 37

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Chapter 36: Suing Ford 

Suing Ford was going to be the title of this book with the subtitle Ten Years of Torture, Bound and Gagged. My working titled was Bleeding Ford Blue. That title, by the way, came from an expression used by Ford employees to say just how loyal they were: “I’m so dedicated to the company that I bleed Ford blue.” I thought I could hit a few high points of my journey from a 10-year-old boy who started bleeding Ford blue in 1956 to a 45-year-old man who was forced to sue the company in 1992.  

I didn’t bargain on now many high points I had to hit to make my last ten years at Ford comprehensible to someone who didn’t grow up when and where I did or share some of my experiences in and out of Ford. I didn’t even realize how important those experiences were until I ran into a blizzard of technical and political stuff that I had to explain but couldn’t explain without them. You had to know more about me than I wanted to tell you and you had to know more about Ford than I knew. Without access to Ford’s confidential documents I had to do a lot of guessing about what was going on at any given time. You had to know why I guessed wrong and why I guessed right.  

You have enough names and dates to do your own research if you want to and blast me with any errors I might have made. But if you assume that I embellished my part in anything said I did for Ford or named every innovation I could recall, you will find out how much I left out. If you try to find other modelers who did as much as I did to raise the profession to a higher level than it was in the 1950’s, you won’t find one.  

Shortly you will see how the advent of electronic math modeling and full surface milling took the modeling profession and the entire automotive design process backward. You will see why it wouldn’t have gone backward with Mike Horni at the helm and why it did without him. You will see how Mike Horni became a victim of Ford’s attack on me.   

If you picked up the patterns that told me Ford was going to promote one black Sculptor to Master after its Larry Paluschak gaff, you know that that prediction was not a guess. The guessing was about whether the company would pick Calvin or me for its token. Purnell and Leak weren’t even in the pool of candidates. That was gong to be our next fight and we hoped that this one would prepare the way for it.  

It would have been better for me if Calvin got the nod. I hadn’t yet made it past the midpoint of pay-grade 7 and I was doing things that should have given me a substantial merit raise. We were only a few days from May and I was due for the raise in April. A promotion would have taken me out of the running for the merit increase and I wouldn’t be eligible for another salary hike for at least a year. If Ford promoted Calvin to Master, I had a shot at making Master and getting the raise that came with it in six months. A big reason I couldn’t get out of the second quarter of any pay grade is because I lost the merit increases I was due when the company promoted me from B to A-modeler and from A to Sculptor.   

What I did with the wagon and the interiors should have been enough to get me another O. Learning how to use the new PDMS machine and applying it to the wheels and other projects should have given me a good head start on the next one.  

The PDMS scanning process involved a hell of a lot of steps. If you missed the wrong step you were screwed. Without the right pictures in the right places, you were bound to miss some steps because the manufacturer’s operating instructions assumed the operator knew what to do in those instances without being told. He also assumed that everyone understood the technical language he used. 

I asked around to find out whether someone had already written the kind of manual I had in mind. I found out that Bob Thacker, the Plastic Shop Supervisor who introduced the lighter, thinner vacuum-formed wheel covers to the Design Center, wrote a manual for the previous PDMS. He gave me a copy. It looked so much like the one the inventor of the new PDMS gave me that I knew the inventor had copied his manual from Thacker’s with modifications for the new machine’s updated features. 

I started by working on my manual it at home, during lunchtime at work and during my coffee breaks. When my regular workload eased off, Joe Seibold let me work on it full time.  

I couldn’t get photos of the machine from the manufacturer or take them myself in the studio so I had to make a detailed drawing. I didn’t have access to a computer that would allow me to finish the rest of the manual in a way that matched what the operator saw on the screen so I had to do a considerable amount of drawing, copying, cutting and pasting by hand. I had to simply the instructions, arrange each step in a way that was easy to follow and find language that the modelers understood to us in place of the language that the current operators went to school to learn.  

After I had written the manual, drawn the pictures and pasted the numbers where they belonged, I had to give the book to different modelers to see if they could follow it. I looked at their hands and their eyes and asked them to tell me in their own words what they were doing as they were doing it. If they weren’t sure of which keys or buttons to press or where to look or if their lips said the right things and their fingers and eyeballs said the wrong things. I keyed on the fingers and eyeballs. Different modelers had difficulty with different parts of the manual. I had to redo those parts until I had them down to a minimum and I could be reasonable sure that practice would take care of the rest.  

I was doing the second or third draft of the PDMS manual when Joe Seibold called me into his office and handed me a slip of paper. The first thing that registered was the 8.6 percent raise. Then I noticed the O. The last thing I noticed was the promotion, effective May 15.  

In another two weeks I was going to be a Master Modeler.  

This was an historic moment for Ford Motor Co. After nearly fifty years of inviting white people and two Mexican-Americans to joint the Master Modeler club it had selected its first African-American member. It wasn’t a happy occasion for Joe or me. Too much legal maneuvering had been involved in the selection and I was too busy beating up Joe about losing my merit raise for either of us to celebrate. I didn’t know it then, but Joe was also unhappy about the Supervisors being cut out of the selection process. They didn’t make the decision, Personnel did.  

Although I questioned aloud whether I would accept the promotion, Joe and I knew that I had to accept it. By making the offer Ford was no longer on the hook to promote any black modelers to Master.  

The timing of the promotion sucked because the EEOC hadn’t started its investigation yet – at least it hadn’t started doing anything that you or I would think of as an investigation. My racial discrimination charge was now void. I couldn’t continue with a complaint that said I hadn’t been promoted when I had.  

The only way I could stay in the fight was to make out a new complaint charging that the promotion itself, the timing and my 8.6% increase showed a continuing pattern of racial discrimination against me going all the way back to 1966. Every Master Modeler I talked to who was willing to say how much of a raise he got with his promotion told me that he got a 10 or 12 percent increase. I guessed that all of the new Masters got raises somewhere in that range or they were already pulling down salaries toward the upper end of the third quarter and could get just as much money with a lower percentage.  I re-filed my charges accordingly.

It was a trap set for the older white modelers but I stepped smack into it.  

While I expected Ford to rectify the mistake of promoting five more white modeler after it promoted Larry Paluschak, I missed the invisible escape hatch it built into the promotion list. I knew that Ford would play fast and loose with the numbers but I didn’t think any large corporation would submit outright fraudulent documents to a high profile federal agency with punitive powers. I didn’t think that the EEOC would accept the documents Ford presented to it without allowing the plaintiffs to see them, let alone challenge them. I expected EEOC investigators to come to the Design Center, study the Personnel files and interview people who could support or refute our charges.  

Ford’s invisible escape hatch was the 7.7 percent raise it gave to Larry Paluschak. $1,150 separated his new monthly first quarter salary from the highest paid new Master on the six-man list with him. The older modelers could therefore not argue that Paluschak got preferential treatment because of his age. The difference between the percentage of his raise and theirs was less than 1% but the difference in his base pay and the base pay of the top four men on the list was $870 or more. For the top three it was $1,000 or more. That’s how much the pay range for Sculptors and Masters overlapped.  

Those dollar amounts reflected the fact that the top four men on the list had been in the profession for at least 7 years longer than Paluschak had. Two of them had been modelers for at least 18 years longer than he had. The formula for calculating the raises of the top three would not allow them to get higher increase percentages than they got because they were in the 4^th quarter – the top 25% – of their previous pay range. The new pay range put them in the 3^rd quarter but gave them a higher ceiling.  

Masters could make almost $1,000 more than Sculptors and their next raise would show what they really got on this one. That means Larry Paluschak, who was only in the first quarter of Master Modeler, was poised to make out better, percentage-wise, in 1993 than anyone else on the list and as well dollar-wise over the course of his remaining career as the highest man on the list. The deciding factor would be the “quality” of his next O. 

Remember, all O’s are not created equal. When I got my first O I thought I was in the top 10% of all Ford modelers. When I got my second O, I learned that it wasn’t quite the top 20%. Joe Seibold thought 30% of the modelers were rated O. He wasn’t impressed with the two I got from Greg Arceri but he couldn’t give me a lower one as a Sculptor without explaining, in effect, why I deserved a lower rating than his other O Sculptors. He had the same problem with lowering theirs.

George Wood told me that he got O’s for most of his career. Some Supervisors and modelers didn’t think he deserved any. Ditto for Bill Wight, Ed Jubeck, Chuck Lukas and me.  

When I got my third O, I compared my entire performance review to Calvin’s, who got as much money over the years with his high EP’s as some modelers got with low O’s. We went down the check boxes in every category on all three pages. He had more O’s than I had. But on the last page, the only page that counted for the record, Calvin got an EP.  

The key to getting lots of O’s was getting the first one early in your modeling career. That’s what made Larry Paluschak’s O in the higher Master Modeler bracket more significant than his current salary or his 7.7 percent raise. He was poised to reach the third quarter in less than five years and the top of the fourth quarter long before he retired.  

My name appeared on a two-man promotion list. George Wood, who had secured the services of an attorney to press his age discrimination case, was the other man on the list. Two promotion lists, a month apart and the way the second one came about, meant that all the modelers on the first list were judged as superior to George Wood and me. No matter what we did, the company had to exert pressure on our Supervisors to justify not putting us on the first list – or figure out a way to combine the lists to make it appear that we got more than we deserved.   Ford did both.  

The permutations were difficult enough to calculate with all of the cards on the table. Using the documents Ford supplied to the EEOC, you could spend months just trying to find the cards. You couldn’t find them all because Ford kept one vital card up its sleeve. It didn’t tell the EEOC that it made two promotion lists. The primary document that it submitted to the agency listed eight men on one promotion list. Of the eight, my increase percentage was the highest; my salary was $5 more than Bill Wight’s and $385 more than Paluschak’s, which put me sixth.  Ford also included a category called “Ford Service Year.” Mine started in 1977. By that calculation it looked as though I had been modeling clay for 15 years instead of 23 and Paluschak had been at it for 14 years instead of 8.  

In case you missed how this sleight-of-hand trick works, here it is, step-by-step, in a transparent nutshell:  

Ford promoted Paluschak but kept the exact percentage of his raise flexible. Ford then put Sanson, Jubick, Thompson Lukas and Weight on the same promotion list. Ford solidified the exact amount of their raises and use them to calculate Paluschak’s raise; to make his lower than any of theirs, but not so low that he couldn’t make it up in a year or two. Next, Ford promoted George Wood and me, juggled the numbers and slipped in a misleading category to make continues seniority look like comparable years of clay modeling experience.  

You can’t see this sequence on a sheet of paper with no names or dates, a Race category, numbers plugged into categories for Ford Years of Service, % of Increase, New Salary Monthly and Salary Range Quarter.

You can’t challenge a fraudulent document if you don’t know it exists.  

Purnell, Calvin and I were banking on EEOC investigators to uncover bogus information like this. We thought it was their job. We thought they would sort out relevant and accurate information from irrelevant and inaccurate information the way we did in our work before they did anything else. After all, how could they know whom to question, what questions to ask and what weight to give the answers if they don’t have the basic information right to start with?  

We hadn’t wanted to go to the EEOC initially because we didn’t trust they would be open to an investigation. But the EEOC people we talked to seemed like dedicated civil servants and they promised us they would investigate. I wasn’t concerned about getting everything right in my complaint because no one outside of Ford’s decision-making process had access to all of the pertinent facts. The EEOC could get access. The question I should have asked myself was would they? 

While we were waiting for the investigation to begin, Charles Purnell suggested that we hire an attorney to cover ourselves in case the EEOC ruled against us. It sounded to me like a prudent move. The forms we had to fill out didn’t ask the right questions to get at the subtle methods Ford used to practice illegal discriminate. It had cracks we could fall through if the Commission decided that our case was a low priority.  

The EEOC’s most pressing workplace issue at the time in Southeast Michigan was sex discrimination. Our case didn’t look nearly as urgent on the surface. Nobody had tried to rape us. All of us were making more money than most people in the United States, including the EEOC field investigators and their supervisors. None of us had been dismissed or threatened with dismissal. The meat of our case was below the surface in the mechanisms of discrimination used against blacks, women and older workers. Those methods and their implications for everybody in the country outside of the exclusive corporate clubs were visible only below the surface. 

We had been blindsided once by not being up to date on the law. We were now squarely in an area of lawyers. We need our own lawyer.  

Through Purnell’s wide network of friends and acquaintances he was able to come of with a highly recommended attorney named Martin Weisman. Purnell, Calvin and I met with him and one of his associates in his Southfield office. Both lawyers told us that they thought we had a good shot at winning a race discrimination lawsuit and suggest that we add age discrimination to the charge. I believed Ford was targeting its older salaried workers and the black ones were just stalking goats the company was using to see if they could get away with it. I thought that I had to be older to make an age discrimination claim. I was 45. Martin told us that 45 was the cutoff age. I was impressed. 

If we needed our own lawyer we were going to Martin Weisman, even though we would have to plop down $1,200 each to retain him and another hundred bucks every time we met with him again.  

We didn’t know that Martin was also going to bill us every time we spoke on the phone. We didn’t know that everything we put into the case would be wasted on the same kind of investigation the EEOC conducted and the findings of a statistical expert who accepted Ford’s documents on their face. We didn’t know that our lawyer was going to accept Ford’s documents on face value and proceed accordingly. 

We found out what constituted the EEOC investigation a few days after our first visit with Martin when we got a letter from the Commission denying our claims.  

My claim was denied because I got the best treatment of anyone on the eight-man promotion list, I got the largest increase percentage. I was getting a little more money than one white modeler with 11 years more seniority. I was getting much more than a white modeler with only one less year of experience. My salary was well within Ford’s Master Modeler range and I made Master faster than seven of the eight white modelers on the list.  

Calvin’s claim was denied because all eight of the modelers on the list had Outstanding performance reviews. Calvin had an EP. The fact that one of the men promoted to Master was black showed the EEOC that Calvin was passed over because he didn’t meet the O qualification that the rest of us met, not because he was black.  

Purnell’s claim was denied because his E performance review didn’t come close to qualifying him to be on the promotion list. 

The EEOC never looked at the color line that separated the EP’s and the E’s from the O’s or what I had to do other than my job to get my O’s or how I won the first fight to keep my last EP from dropping to an E. 

We didn’t think that Ford would submit false documents to the EEOC and we didn’t have the document that Ford used to contrive it. We could only guess from the wording of the denial that Ford had merged the two lists and submitted the combined list to the EEOC as though it gave all of us the same unbiased consideration. We couldn’t prove it. Therefore, we could only guess that the EEOC regarded my complaints to the defunct civil rights agencies before my promotion, without the facts to support it, as a paranoid assessment of what Ford had actually done.  

That was the best spin we could give to how my Cason letter and my OFCCP complaint looked to the EEOC in light of my promotion “with seven other men.” At worst, Ford’s version of how I got promoted and why Calvin and Purnell were denied made me a liar, an ingrate and a man desperately trying to create a racial issue where none existed. It made Calvin and Purnell look like greedy opportunists trying to get something from the EEOC that they didn’t earn by their job performance. 

Money, per se, was not the issue with Calvin, Purnell or me. Even with my promotion Calvin made more money than I did. He lived where he wanted to live. His house was paid for and he piloted his own airplane. Purnell had no wife, ex-wife or children to support and more disposable income than Calvin or I. He had no expensive habits, hobbies, obligations or ambitions. He could make enough money on overtime to enjoy vacations abroad and buy all the toys he wanted. My sons were grown up and I had enough money in a growing optical supply stock and savings to support all of my habits, hobbies, obligations and ambitions.  

The Master Modeler title was not, in itself, significant to any of us. The significance of the title was the instant recognition of what we had done and what we could do that the title conferred on those who held it. The money and the title were trophies. The nature of our work meant that we had nothing concrete to show what we did from day to day. We wanted the trophies that our white, male counterparts got for doing what we did or less. People had lost their lives in a long struggle to get people like us into places like Ford design and we could not get around our obligation to them to make the best use of the opportunities they gave us. We needed the “trophies” to show that we did not let them down.  

Charles Purnell summed it up best with his reaction to the EEOC’s denial of our claims. “They don’t get it,” he said. “They’re treating the Design Center like it was any other place in the company. It isn’t. This is where everything starts. What we do affects everybody in the whole country and if they don’t now what we do and give us credit for it, they could end up screwing everybody.” 

That was the fundamental issue.  

If I had wanted to drop the matter, I couldn’t have done it without tossing Calvin, Purnell and Leak to the wolves. Three black modelers were working as temps. I never learned the name of one of them because he refused to talk to me. The chances of any of them getting hired and promoted were now in jeopardy. All of the women modelers were in jeopardy and so were the older white modelers. Ford now had a proven formula for savaging all of them – and they were using me to do it. 

The EEOC would have been in a better position to put the black modelers’ complaints in context if they had seen what was going on with Jack Telnack’s  “Design Center Renewal Process.” We weren’t the only ones who thought the Company’s recognition and rewards systems were unfair or that the company was manipulating facts and figures to paint a false picture of reality to their detriment. Even most of the O’s were unhappy because they had gotten O’s for their entire career and they were so far from the top of their salary grade range that it was impossible for them to ever get there.  

Howard Thompson “joked” that he got to the top of pay grade 7 only by getting promoted to pay grade 8. That’s the only way I got past the mid-point of 7. Some secretaries were unhappy with their inability to move past pay grade 2. My sister Sara, who worked outside of the Design Center, couldn’t get past pay grade 1 after 20 years of service. Talking to her, I learned that the salaried workers’ issues where she worked were the same as ours. Frank Horenkamp’s son Joe was a salaried worker at another Ford facility. Salaried workers there had the same complaints. They didn’t trust Ford to be fair and honest with them. 

Long before I got the official word, I knew that the so-called Design Center Renewal Process was a pilot program for the whole company.  

At an “all hands” meeting in the showroom, Jack, Fritz and other top Design Center executives outlined their program for restoring trust in the company. They identified key areas in which they wanted to improve and invited the troops to sign up for participation in committees to address their concerns. I signed up for something called the Performance Review and Promotional Practices Task Force. “Task force” sounded better than “committee.” Like Calvin and Purnell, I expected it to be a sham, but I wanted to be there to see how Ford tried to pull it off and to gum up the works as much as possible if they did.  

Before my first meeting with the PR/PP committee, Richard Porter gave Calvin, Leak, Purnell and me a copy of a letter on Ford stationery. The letter asked all African-American’s in the Design Center to attend a meeting with four top executives. Our names were on the “To” line of the heading. The Subject line said something about an AA Task Force.  

Ford had acronyms for everything. AA was Ford’s acronym for African-American. We all laughed. We had gone from niggers to Negroes, to blacks and African-Americans. Nigger meant what it always had. Negro had become a racial epithet in colloquial usage. Black was no longer synonymous with inferior and African-American was merely a reference to our African and American progenitors’ origin.  Now we were AA’s. What the hell did that mean? 

Richard urged us to be there as the people who lived the history blacks in Ford design and as a personal favor to him. This happened so soon after I got my promotion that I hadn’t attended my first Master Modeler meeting. Richard and I respected each other’s intelligence and integrity so the only issue between us was whether Ford had enough intelligence and integrity to play it straight. Calvin, Purnell and I resisted. Leak still wanted to give Ford the benefit of the doubt.  

In the end, we all decided to go, mostly in indifference to our respect for Richard. But the deciding factor for me was one executive’s name on the list of Design Center executives in the letter that gave me a glimmer of hope that Ford just might play it straight this time.  

Gary Haas was a newly appointed Director, a close friend of my old friend Ray Fregard and one of the last designers I would have thought would make Director because of his well-earned reputation for integrity. Everybody respected Gary Haas. The only other Director who had Hass’ reputation was Andy Jacobson. If one of them hadn’t been scheduled to be at the meeting, I doubt that half of the “AA’s” would have attended. 

The meeting turned sour in the first few minutes, beginning with the input of Gary Haas and a “girl” who shouldn’t have been there because she was a temp. The girl was Tammy. I didn’t recall seeing her name on the list and I never learned who invited her.  

Richard assumed half the responsibility of recording the proceedings with colored felt-tipped pens on large rolls of paper the way Ford’s California consultant had prescribed for holding meetings. A black personnel rep from Ohio name Cerita Brown took the other half of the recording duties. She could not participate in the discussions although I could see she was sometimes bursting to. Richard could.  

Richard stepped out of his “recorder” role three times. He did it the first time to “clarify” things when Mike Easton did exactly what Cal, Purnell and I said he would do with my promotion, Cal’s salary and the “clay modeler” designation of Andy Walker and Mel Edwards. He did it again when Eason tried to use “minorities” and “AA’s” interchangeably. He did it the last time to keep some of us from strangling Tammy.  

Gary nearly shocked me out of my shoes when he said up front that Ford did not practice racial discrimination. He thought it was a perception problem and he wanted to get at whatever it was that created the perception. Jack and Fritz looked uncomfortable with Gary’s remarks but said nothing. Nobody wanted to embarrass Gary with a reminder of the class action race and sex discrimination suite Ford settled in 1980. We preferred to think of what he said as a case of temporary insanity or a clever ploy to keep Jack, Fritz and Easton from knowing that he was on our side. He was supposed to be impartial.  

Calvin picked up the baton by giving examples from his experience going all the way back to 1966 that showed how badly mistaken Gary was – perhaps because he didn’t know that such things went on. Purnell and I did likewise. When I mentioned the Nazi and the Klansman who had a lasting impact on my career, I caught a glimpse of Tammy from the corner of my eye shifting in her seat as though she had to go to the ladies room. Then I saw that she was starting to get angry. Ah! I thought. We’re finally getting through to her.  

I shifted my attention to Sam Mayers, Ford’s first black designer and the first black designer to make it into the supervisory ranks as a grade 10 Manager. He gave other examples of racial discrimination from his experience that could not be attributed to AA perception deficiencies.  

Gary stepped on his dick again by pointing out how difficult it was for anyone to rise above Sam’s position and telling us that he made Director because he was rated in the top 2% of all designers. It was stunning that he would say something like that considering all of the top-selling cars Sam was principally responsible for designing and the designer talent Sam had brought into Ford. Compared to Sam, Gary had done nothing. Yet Garry was a grade 16 and same was a grade 10.  

Calvin tried to say something about what he had to do to get into modeling and how it was the he had more Ford seniority than I had when Tammy cut him off. She was angry, all right. She was angry with “old guys” getting in the way off young people who wanted to work complaining about something that happened to them in 1932.” She was angry with black people who were “looking for affirmative action to give them something instead of working for it.” She preached to us about living in the past instead of doing what we had to do to educate ourselves so we could qualify for advancement. 

Richard stopped writing. Fritz and Jack looked at each other blankly. Mike Eason, of all people, pointed out a glaring flaw in Tammy’s analysis. He informed the group that all African-Americans in the Design Center were qualified to do their jobs and affirmative action did not require the company to hire anyone who wasn’t qualified. He said it as though the suggestion that Ford bent or could be bent to pressure to hire or promote unqualified people was a sore point with him. I saw how it would be with disgruntled white men charging Personnel with “reverse discrimination” every time a woman or an ethic minority got a position he thought he or one of his relatives should have had.  

Fritz said the he thought Tammy had a valid point – not that any of the black people in the room weren’t qualified to do their jobs or to move ahead – but that we should forget the past and concentrate on the future. Jack agreed. I was sitting between Garry and Purnell. I looked at Purnell and his fact told me that he was thinking the same thing I was. We tuned our heads at the same time toward Tammy. Calvin and Dennis Moses were looking at her the same way. Things could have gone straight to hell from there if Richard Porter hadn’t stepped in to ask a black millwright what he thought  

The millwright was an hourly worker. Hourly workers were still getting cost of living increases and profit sharing checks. I don’t know how the millwright got invited to the meeting, either, but I was glad he came. He told the group that none of the issues we presented were a problem for Ford’s hourly workers. He said that the union had a grievance procedure to keep disputes from dragging out for decades and the company had a clear set of guidelines for raises and promotions. None of the black salaried workers in the meeting asked for more. Easton said that it wasn’t necessary because we could go to Personnel with our disputes and the company was working on clearer guidelines for raises and promotions.  

Jack and Fritz announce that they thought the meeting had gone well. Indeed, Tammy’s speech had made it a roaring success for them. Nobody in the group had agreed with Tammy but one or two of the younger people had agreed with their voices and body language with Fritz. Same thing. The Design Center now had a divide and conquer model it could use against other groups.  

Every group has a Tammy. The Design Center had all the Tammy’s it needed. In fact, it no longer needed her. She was gone in less than a year. Another temp replaced her.  

Ford structured the Performance Review/Promotional Practices group to be as ineffectual as the AA group. Each group had to have one Director and one Personnel representative. That requirement was enough to turn each “task force” – the official name tacked onto every group – into a management rubber stamp if the members knew what was good for them on their next performance review. The Director in our group was Gary Haas. The Personnel rep was Jack Telnack’s man George Valsa. They were supposed to be there only as individuals with more knowledge than the other group members had on some aspects of performance reviews and promotional practices. That was the first thing I was going to test…

When you go into a meeting like the one at Purnell’s house with the intention of contributing what you can to the group and learning what you could from them, everyone is equal. Your pay grade is irrelevant to the influence you can exert. It doesn’t matter who you know, how you dress or where you sit. The only things that matter are what you say, how you say it and when.   

When you go into a meeting like the one with Richard Porter and the four execs with the intention of testing its validity, you look for power relationships. You look for leaders, followers and Tammys. You look for who gives deference to whom and how the comments or lack of comments from the big brass affects subtle shifts in power.   

When you go into any meeting with the intention of dominating it, you look for the real group leaders because they are the ones that the smartest followers will follow. You look for the people who want to curry favor with the people they think are the real leaders because they are your biggest threats. You take a seat abreast of the apparent leaders so you don’t appear to be challenging them head on when you are. You probe for the earliest opening you can get to frame the issues your way and you pounce on it like a tiger on the back of a buffalo. 

Before my first PR/PP task force meeting with Gary Hass and George Valsa, I studied the list of other group members scheduled to attend. I knew that Haas and Valsa would be the 500-pound gorillas guarding the gates of dialogue, so I planned a strategy to punch holes in the wall around them. I prepared a short, typewritten paragraph of what I thought the group’s mission should be. The plan worked.  

For a dozen meeting after the first one, diddling with the mission statement became a priority item on the agenda. I’m sure that George Valsa was the only one who saw though my smokescreen of up putting up a fight to pressure my original wording. Sure, I wanted to see it the way I wrote it because it would have forced the company to make concrete changes or disband the group. But only two words were essential. Regardless of how my statement was edited, the Personnel-approved document would have to contain the words “fair” and “honest.” Whatever changes Ford made to it performance reviews and promotional practices would be measure against those standards.  

I didn’t expect the performance review system to accomplish anything in the way of fairness and honesty. All I wanted to do was to make the unfairness and dishonesty more transparent. I identified the company’s staggered dates for giving annual performance reviews and the 12 to 24 month range in which merit increases were award as the biggest barriers to a fair and honest system.

This is the example I gave to the committee in writing: 

One person’s 9% raise was comparable to another person’s 9% raise only if both of them got it in the same time interval. Even then you couldn’t tell what the annual percentage worked out to until you knew when the next raise was going to come. If one came in 12 months, 9% was 9%. If the other “9%” raise came in 18 months, the real percentage was 6%. If it came in 12 months the real annual increase was 4.5.  

That’s what made Paluschak’s 7.7% raise and my 8.6% raise deceptive.  Only the people responsible for giving the raises knew what the real percentage was because they knew when the next raise was going to be.  Personnel had the final say over when that would be.  

There had to be a simple way for Supervisors to make that calculation, so I looked for it and I found it.   

Supervisors used a matrix called an Annual Rate of Progression Index printed on a standard box grid. Reading down the left side of the index, they could find a percentage that ranged from 0 to 12% or more. This is the visible percentage that appeared on official documents. Reading the numbers across the top of the index that represented a waiting period from 0 to 12 months the Supervisors could figure the Annual Rate of Progression. Ford called it the ARP. I called it the real increase. Reading the boxes to the right of the official percentage they could find the box with the real percentage. Reading up to the number of months at the top of the column, the Supervisors could tell when the next increase had to come to match the ARP for the official raise. 

I targeted the ARP as the percentage that everybody had to see to see what they were really getting every year, knowing damn well that Ford would never go for it. But once I articulated the problem with the hidden calculation and the “potential” for using it to confuse and deceive, it became possible to sell an annual merit increase policy. When Bob Aiken and Ray Palicki added their voices and their independent research and calculations to mine with the same bottom line, an annual salary increase policy became inevitable.  

The logic of our case was inescapable. I know that George Valsa was relieved when Chrysler bailed him out of his untenable position by announcing an annual merit increases policy that he had been telling us was impossible.  

The PR/PP Task Force became the pilot group for the entire company. Garry Haas, Al Biggs and Lydia – the PR/PP group’s Tammy – were the last to see the light.