Chapter 41: Futile Exercises
Purnell had to tell his lawyer friend
Jennifer why Fords version of how I got my promotion and the raise that came with it
mattered to both of us. She got impatient with both us for not listening to her until it
dawned on her that I could prove Ford had gotten our previous claims dismissed by
submitting false documents to the EEOC and a federal district judge.
Jennifer told us that what Ford did
with the combined promotion list violated a principle of law she called candor to
the court. Lawyers can bend the facts into any shape to fit the case
they want make, but they cant deliberately submit false documents to the court
without paying steep penalties. Individual attorneys can be disbarred and the cases those
documents were based on can be overturned. Jennifer couldnt understand why our
lawyers didnt bring it to the judges attention.
Purnell kept excellent records so I
went to his house believing that he had copies of the two promotion lists. He, Jennifer
and I looked for them but we couldnt find them. Instead, Jennifer found something in
Purnells file regarding his old Supervisor Frank DeBono that she thought was
significant. She forgot about candor to the court. As Purnell always
maintained, Frank was Fords weak link in its defense against his charges. They spent
the rest of the afternoon talking about it.
I went home with a pounding headache.
Things were going no better for me at
Ford. Mike Hornai gave me an EP just as I told him he would have to no matter what I did
because I couldnt do much in ICEM-Surf. He had to give Os to Larry, Todd and
to Mark Ritz, who was now a Ford employee, because they did more work for him in ICEM-Serf
than I could do. Robison was not a Ford employee but he was also doing much more that I
was. I did no class-A work. It wasnt my fault and it wasnt Mikes. He had
a lot to do. He had to depend on the people who could do it and he had to reward them for
it.
Mike decried the entire system. He
was supposed to give only two Os. He was supposed to divide his EPs into three
levels and he was being pressed to use evaluation devices called tearing, and
red, yellow, green to lower his other performance review ratings. His boss, a
newly appointed Chief Engineer in her 30s named Elaine Haas, wanted him to give out
Es. Mike didnt think anyone in his group deserved an E.
Elaine didnt think Mike was a
team player and she was cracking down hard on her subordinates who didnt toe the
line. It wouldnt have been so bad if she knew anything about automotive design. She
didnt. At one meeting with her engineers she asked a question that had all of them
shaking their heads in dismay. She asked, Whats the difference between a tire
and a wheel.
How can you tell the Chief Engineer
of an automotive division that a wheel is the round metal thing commonly called a rim and
a tire is the rubber thing that goes on the wheel? Mike had to put up with that sort of
thing every day. And all of us had to go to her all hands meetings where she
told us with great excitement things she just discovered that the old hands learned when
she was in kindergarten. We had to listen to her tell stories about her adventures in
engineering and the wonderful innovations that were going to revolutionize the industry.
Elaine didnt now the pitfalls
of the revolution she envisioned. She knew the latest popular theories but she didnt
know where theory and practice collided. She got many basic things wrong because she had
no experience with them and no tolerance for dissenting views of engineers who did have
the experience. She kept a nutcracker on her desk and fired an outstanding engineer I knew
for insubordination. She viewed most of us as dinosaurs who couldnt adapt to the
changing environment old dogs too set in our way to learn new tricks. The more she
talked the worse it got. Her meetings made me physically ill. My heart thumped like crazy.
My head throbbed. I thought I was going to die.
I should have listened to what my
body was trying to tell me. Working for Ford was becoming hazardous to my health.
Elaine was undoubtedly a star
performer wherever she came from. Ford was looking for stars, especially young ones, and
constantly devising costly and complicated ways to separate them from the pack. Some of
Fords best engineers learned on the job and didnt have engineering degrees.
Ford wanted all of its engineers to have degrees. It paid tuition for its employees who
wanted them to get them and awarded bonus point to employees who took advantage of any
other educational opportunities it offered. You could go farther by going to school than
you could by doing your work.
Eventually Ford made it mandatory for
everyone to stop whatever they were doing for an afternoon, a day or a series of days to
participate in seminars at distant locations. If you didnt attend your performance
review would suffer.
The final straw for me was when Ford
decided that it wanted only the top 2% of graduates from the most prestigious universities
to hold key positions in the company. Ford was hiring the best engineers
straight out of school left and right and putting them on the fast track.
I had an eye-opening encounter with
one of these guys who knew everything about Fords new software systems that managed
data and nothing about the data. He questioned a missing line on the math
model I was doing. I couldnt understand what he was talking about so he took me
downstairs to the studio to show me on the clay model where I screwed up. He pointed at
the line that made no sense to be where he said it was and didnt see it until I bent
down and looked closer. He was pointing to a cut that a clay modeler put in the DiNoc
because the modeler couldnt get the material to stretch. It was the best place to
hide the necessary DiNoc cut. The wiz kid didnt know what DiNoc was.
Mike Hornai had a similar experience
with a note from another 4.0 graduate from a prestigious university instructing him to do
something with an accelerated sweep. An accelerated curve is a segment
of a spiral. A weep is a segment of a circle. There is no such thing as an
accelerated sweep. There cant be.
Mike stared at the note for an
inordinate amount of time trying to decipher it. He read it out loud. I laughed. Mike cut
loose with a torrent of curses, balled up the paper and slung it across the room. The
scary thing was that Dave Connelly and I were the only ones who understood why Mike
reacted the way he did. Larry, Todd, Mark and Dave Robison were baffled. They
couldnt understand the note, either. But they thought it was their fault. They
wanted to learn what the message meant. They thought that it had to mean something. It
did. It meant that the guy who wrote it didnt know squat about automotive design.
Mike had similar wiz kit problems
with his star ICEM-Surf users.
Robison did a model on the tube that looked terrific. On the clay
model it looked grotesque. Neither Mike nor I would have made the fundamental mistakes
that Robison made but neither of us were as proficient with Surf as Robison was so his
model had the go the complete cycle for the errors to show up. I started the front end of
the 2000 T-Bird but Mike gave the job to Mark Ritz when he saw how far I deviated from the
scan data. Mark spent months on the job and ended up where I started with the biggest
deviations I made. None of the star Surf users could understand why their finished cut
lines didnt look the way they expected them to. Mike tried everything he could think
of to explain it to them. Connelly and I were the only ones who didnt need an
explanation. We knew.
Connelly and I briefly revived our
work in DDN. We got the 2000 T-Bird off the ground with our interior surfacing and Kim
Grubers covert assistance. Someone high up decided that we shouldnt be using
DDN, but Mike thought that it would be ideal for starting the new T-Bird and told us to go
ahead with it. He thought that it could prove its worth and he wanted me to do something
visible to make it impossible for Elaine to justify giving me anything less than an O. It
was the kind of challenge I thrived on, a challenge to lift my profession to a higher
level. The raw data I could generate with DDN in a month would save the company a year in
lead-time. Nobody else thought it was possible. That was my ace in the hole. I knew that
it was possible for a true Master Modeler.
The Surf program evolved from
programmers going to expert Surf users to give them the features they wanted. I attended
one programmer meeting with Mikes group and other Surf users including Angela. Here
I saw why Surf was so complicated, why it took a dozen steps or more to do things that
should have taken only two or three steps. The first Surf users didnt know how to
reduce their tasks to the lowest common denominators. When they became experts they passed
on what they knew to another generation of experts who added more steps to solve their
problems. The programmer put the new steps under menu headings that had no visual or
rational link to the operation. He put them wherever it was convenient for him and told
the experts where to find them.
Robison and Ritz were bursting to
tell the programmer what changes they would like to see in Surf. It quickly became
apparent that the American programmer was listening only to Angela and a guy I didnt
know from England. If you spoke with an American accent you might as well have kept your
mouth shut. The name of the game was follow-the- leader and the leader was European.
Connelly and I didnt have to
put up with that nonsense in DDN. Kim was rewriting the program to our specifications and
we were just beginning our exterior work when Les Martin decided to do it
right in Surf. He appropriated one section of the vehicle after another and
told everyone who would listen that DDN was the wrong way to go.
The lawsuit put me under unbelievable
pressure to do something spectacular. With DDN I could do it. I could do what I put my
career on t the line to do by getting into math modeling. I could be creative. I could be
inventive. I could set the models up in a way that no competent designer or modeler could
go around in circles for years before zeroing in on the optimum design. This wasnt a
million dollar challenge it was a billion dollar challenge and Les Martin was steadily
positioning himself as an expert in Surf and DDN to speak with authority
against DDN.
I tried to talk to Les about the
implications of what he was doing. He was completely oblivious to the fact that I was
seriously considering murdering him. He was not thinking about the fact that I was in a
war and he was giving shit to a man who had taken VC life and enjoyed it. We were standing
alone at the top of a long flight of stairs in VC-2.
My heart pounded fiercely and my
right arm shook with tension as Les turned to strut away. I flashed on my Army basic
training experience with the kid I slammed against the locker without realizing what
Id done or what I was about to do. I wasnt thinking then. I was
thinking now.
Not killing Les Marten was one of the
hardest choices I ever made
.
Dave Connellys arthritis got so
bad that he retired leaving only me to carry on the DDN model with Kim Gruber. We
didnt get far. Kim got orders to stop working with me. It was a moot point because
someone came along and uninstalled my DDN math modeling software.
On the last project I did for Mike
Hornai I got a chance to implement a lead-time reduction process that Mike asked me to
work out. Dave Hackett was the Master Modeler and a brilliant man named Lou Schaeffer was
the engineer. A young designer named Todd had a great Mustang design going and his
superiors wanted to see it on a T-Bird platform with running changes to the wheelbase and
greenhouse. A year or more was normally spent in going back and fourth between design and
engineering to get everyone on the same information page. As the math modeler in charge I
was able to keep everyone on the same page every day by working out the surface
development implications of design and engineering changes in Surf before the model was
milled.
I had seven saved iteration in my
computer and Dave Hackett had hard copy pictures of my last three or four.
Everything was going as planned, with
the model a full year ahead of where it normally would have been when someone, on the
Friday night I left work, made a mistake on setting in the wheels to the proper depth.
Someone else assumed that the error was in my math model and the Studio Executive, Helmut
Schroeder, ordered that the clay be taken in so much that nobody knew where anything was
anymore.
I saw the clay wreckage of that
weekends work when I got back to VC-2 that Monday but I couldnt find my model
on my computer. Larry Lauth had modified it to the wrong information. He told me
that Mike Hornai ordered him to do it. I looked for my previously saved version. It
wasnt there. All of my models had been purged from my computer and every backup
system in my network. The only evidence that I did them was in my hard copy folder and
Dave Hacketts folder of the running changes.
I angrily accused Mike of jumping the
gun and assuming I made the mistake when he should have known that I couldnt have
done it, then erasing the evidence to cover his mistake. He fired back, accusing me
of not being man enough to admit my mistake. I left VC-2 in a rage.
When I came back the next day, Mike
told me what happened. He didnt blame me for being so upset and he didnt know
what happened to my computer files. When my files disappeared, so did my lead-time
reduction process
.
Purnell and I got together with the
other lawsuit plaintiffs from time to time. At one meeting I met a woman who knew all
about disappearing databases. It was her job in security to monitor electronically stored
and transmitted data and she worked with people whose job it was to make databases
disappear.
That was one of the last meetings I
had with the group, which had dwindled considerably. Health problems had taken their toll.
Several people who started the lawsuit had been forced to retire. Some were dying. Some
were dead. One man committed suicide.
The earlier meetings were reruns of
the one we had at Purnells house with Richard Porter. Most of the plaintiffs wanted
to show that they were reasonable people and give the company the benefit of the doubt in
their upcoming mediation. Purnell and I argued that it was only a delaying tactic to strip
us of our witnesses through retirement and death and to wear us down. We lost the
argument.
I refused to sign the Alternate Dispute
Resolution agreement. I wanted a jury and I didnt believe that the ADR process would
shorten the litigation. I believed that Ford would use the mediation stage to prolong it.
Springer and Lang tried to drop me as a client. Martin wouldnt allow it because I
hadnt been informed of the consequences of not signing the agreement. Judge Friedman
told our attorneys that he would be inclined to dismiss our complaints.
Without Springer and Lang, I had to proceed with Martin on a pay-as-you-go basis, which
was cost prohibitive, and Martin told me it would be futile because the judge meant that
he would dismiss the case. I signed
the ADR agreement.
Springer and Lang decided that it
would begin the mediations with the weakest cases to get them out of the way.
It sounded to me as though Springer and Lang had cut a deal with Ford to cut both of their
losses. That idea was reinforced when Charles and I got pushed to the back of the line,
although Marten was starting to say that my case was weak. I was dead last. That position
meant that I had the strongest case in the group. The only thing that weakened it was
time.
The kicker was Martins
good news about the new settlement fee arrangement worked out with Judge
Friedman and the lawyers for both sides. There would be no contingency fee. Ford agreed to
pay our attorneys a given amount according to an undisclosed formula so that we would get
100% of the settlement instead of 66.3%. Martin told us this with a straight face. He
acted surprised that we werent jumping with joy.
How could it be happy about a secret
deal formulated by the judge to have Ford paying our lawyers fee? Lawyers assume a
financial risk in representing clients in a lawsuit on a contingency bases with an up
front understating by all that the more they win for their clients the more they get for
themselves. Martin set up his practice on a pay-as-you-go basis because he didnt
want to assume that risk. Now he was telling us that neither his firm nor Springer and
Lang had anything to gain by giving us their best. What does an arrangement like that
sound like to you?
I started hunting for another
attorney. Richard Porter gave the name and phone number of the lawyer who won his
wifes lawsuit against Ford. He never returned my phone calls. I learned that my
cousin Oscar Barns was suing Ford and he recommended his lawyer. I called his lawyer and
he didnt return my calls. He stopped returning Oscars phone calls, too and
sold him out.
In the final analysis I discovered
that I couldnt have gotten a new lawyer anyway. The gag order Judge Freeman placed
on the litigants in 1994 prevented me from showing anyone the relevant documents in my
case without Fords approval. When Purnell showed Jennifer his documents he was in
violation of the order, only neither of us knew it at the time.
As our mediation dates approached in
1998, Purnell and I also learned why Marten didnt go to the press and why he worked
so hard to keep me from doing it. I told Martin that I was going to write a series of
one-page letters to various members of the media in spite of his strong recommendations
not to. Thats when he told me about the gag order.
Ford had been picking off the
plaintiffs one by one, persuading many of them to settle for $5,000 or less before
mediation. Learning that we had a spy at our meetings helped us to explain some of
Fords success. He was not invited back. Ford was down to dealing with the hardcore
plaintiffs and some of its settlement offers were going up. Some werent. Fords
lawyers offered Purnell $50,000. They offered me nothing.
Purnell and I understood one of the
mind games that Fords attorneys were playing with its high offer to
Purnell and it no offer to me. They were trying to separate us, trying to get
us to turn against each other. Not a chance.
So far Purnell had received the highest
offer of anyone but it wasnt enough to make restitution for his salary loss spread
out over thirty years of being underpaid. It wasnt enough to make up for the
indignity of being labeled inferior and treated accordingly for his entire career. It
wasnt enough to make the all-important statement that Ford recognized its
mistreatment of a valuable employee because of his color. It wasnt enough to show
that Ford respected the punitive provisions of the 1991 Civil Rights Act or intended to
change its ways.
Fords refusal to make me a
settlement offer wasnt an acknowledgment of the fact that I was not going to settle
out of court for any amount of money because it clung to the argument that I deserved
nothing. It might have been an attempt to
intimidate me in addition to being a ploy to drive a wedged between Purnell and me. I
suspected, though, that it was mostly aimed at intimidating my lawyers or giving them a
plausible excuse for not pressing my case the way they should have. It depended on whether
our lawyers were sill working for us or were now working for Ford.
As our mediation dates approached,
Fords settlement offer to Purnell increased, topping out at $80,000. Neither of us
wanted to even hear an amount less than the $350,00 in punitive damages alone that we were
certain a jury would have awarded us. We wanted a hearing. We wanted to make a public
record of affirmative actions first beneficiaries. Without that record, auto
industry historians had only Fords version of whether affirmative action helped or
hurt the industry. With the record they could judge for themselves. They could see whether
the sacrifices of everyone in the Civil Rights movement who put us in a position to show
what we could do if we got the chance were worth it. If we could have skipped the
mediation and gone straight to the mini-trial, we would have.
Exactly as we predicted, Ford used the
mediation stage of the ADR proceedings to delay the mini-trial. We went from early 1998 to
mid 1998 and finally to mid November 1998. Some of the plaintiffs whose mediations were
scheduled to take place in 97 didnt join the class action suit until 1994. If
fairness had anything to do with it Purnell and I would have gone first because we were
first to begin our lawsuits in 92. In 1993 Motor Trend Magazine name the Probe
its Car of The Year. In 94 the Mustang was Motor Trends Car of the Year.
No one could deny what those awards did for the prestige of Ford Motor Co. or what I did
in big ways to help Ford win those awards.
The longer it took my case to go to trial
the less meaningful those accomplishments became. Memories faded. Documents got misplaced.
Witnesses got misplaced. Witnesses got bribed or threatened in subtle ways to not to
testify or to skew their testimony against me.
In 94, Frank Horenkamp, my friend
and the editor of the Design Center Highlight, died of heart disease. His death was a
horrible personal loss for me. It was a tremendous stroke of luck for Ford given what
Frank could have and would have said about my extracurricular work for Ford and his talk
with Ford Chairman Donald Peterson about me. In 95 and 96 Ford was setting me
up to fail but I was finding ways to succeed. In 97 and 98 I began to see
strange things happening to my Supervisor Mike Hornai every time he gave me a meaningful
and challenging task and I began to break new ground in meeting the challenge. Ford had
found my weakness. It was going after my friends.
It took years for the pattern to emerge.
Meanwhile, I was getting my feet wet in
the book publishing school of hard knocks with The Invisible Warriors. I wrote the
book certain that the so called lessons of Vietnam that everyone was learning in popular
movies, award-winning books and documentaries would come back at bite the Unites States in
the ass. Finding a publisher proved impossible.
The publishing world was divided into
three camps on the subject of war and peace, liberal, conservative and combat
action with a left wing or right wing slant. My book attacked all three camps. Some
publishes showed interest but insisted that they couldnt do it unless I turned it
into a book of fiction without the political stuff they didnt like and a stronger
emphases on the combat action that they said was great. I couldnt do that because
the point of the book was to show that the war was mostly a contest of words and images.
The political stuff together with the combat action was to show
that I had a first-hand knowledge of the difference between war and combat.
A brilliant engineer named Kathleen
Dalessandro, whom I admired greatly, thought that the book was too important not to be
published and suggested that do it myself. I took her advice and hired two proofreaders
and a professional typesetter named Charles from Wayne State University. I learned the
hard way that proofreading is a talent that few people posses. I learned the hard way that
Charles didnt know as much about the business as I thought he did but he knew a hell
of a lot more than I did and without him I would have gotten nowhere.
I had problems with the drafts he sent me
to review on computer diskettes because the paragraph breaks, the quotes, the caps and the
punctuation marks were written in computer code. I had to write the code to make
corrections and I made as many mistakes with the codes as my proofreaders and I made with
the text. Being dyslexic didnt help.
Then the printer screwed up the cover and I had to pay for it to be done over. I got a new printer and he screwed it up worse than the first one did but I was up against a deadline driven by events in the news and I had to go with it.
I got the first shipment of books from the
printer during my depositions with Ross Plaetzer. He was writing a book about Lincoln and
he found a slew of technical errors that I needed to correct. I ran into my old friend
Christine who also found a bunch of errors. I found many of them myself, errors that I
didnt see before because I knew what was supposed to be there and couldnt see
what was actually in print.
Ross helped me tremendously with the
promotion of The Invisible Warriors. He arranged a book signing at Borders Books
and music where I sold all 50 of the books I sent to the store on special order to sell.
He also found a use for the error-riddled first edition.
It turned out that those errors were necessary to get reviewers to look at it.
Reviewers wanted to be the first to see new publications and uncorrected proofs told them
that they were getting the first look.
I didnt get all of the books from
the printer because I had a tough time selling the ones I got. I sent them to bookstores.
Customers would come into the store and ask for the book but the clerk would tell them
that they didnt have it. $20,000 later I learned that self-publishers in general had
the same problem with bookstores mainly because so many of the clerks were temps. They
didnt list all of the books in the stores inventory, they didnt
categorize them correctly or they didnt bother to check the physical inventory if
they didnt see it in the computer inventory. They were getting minimum wages from
the agency they worked for and they had no stake in the bookstores profits so most
of them didnt care whether the customers got the books they wanted or they
didnt.
The same sort of thing was happening with
Fords agency secretaries. The secretaries on Fords salary payroll were the
glue that held the soled parts of the company together and the lubricant that kept the
moving parts running. Ford was replacing them with agency people who were putting
lubricant in the joints that had to be glued and putting glue in the running parts. They
either didnt know or didnt care what they were doing to Ford Motor Co. and it
would be years before the company would feel the affects because there were still enough
people in place who knew their jobs and cared enough to do them well.
In other words, the self-sabotaging
cost-cutting strategies that Ford was using and I was fighting in my lawsuit were becoming
the way big companies throughout the US did business. You had to be on the cutting edge of
these developments to know what was happening
.
Greg Arceris fortunes began to decline a few years after he gave me an EP but recommended me for a job as Supervisor in a new math modeling group in 95. He told me some of the reasons that he wanted me to be the next math modeling Supervisor. I could guess the rest.
Both of us had served in the Army. My Army
record together with my work in Concepts and Components and Mustang showed Greg that I had
the leadership tools to perform difficult tasks consistently under pressure. I was
clay modeler friendly and Greg wanted an ally in a key position who
appreciated what modelers did for design and engineering. He wanted the value of his Ford
stock to go up when he retired.
The EP Greg gave me combined with his
Supervisor recommendation told a story that didnt add up unless my assertions about
the PR system were true. It spotlighted the bell curve flaw in the system that didnt
allow fair-minded Supervisors to give all of their best people what they deserved. Greg
was super smart but super resistant to the idea that he could make unfair choices even
when he was forced to. He found ways to justify his unfair choices but he sounded idiotic
when he did it. He couldnt stand the thought of being the bad guy. Therefore, he
couldnt see what his EP together with his Supervisor recommendation told me
and Fords lawyers.
I didnt get the Supervisor job,
partly because Ford reorganized the post out of existence for a few years. A younger white
man named Dan Botruff got it. Botruff joined the company in 1990. I dont think
anyone ever asked Dave Delikta or Mike Hornai to recommend a new Supervisor. They might
not have chosen me but they would not have chosen Botruff. He didnt know the people
I knew who could do everything that had to be done or point to who could do it. He
didnt have the breadth of knowledge that I had in design, engineering and modeling.
Few people did and the list was getting smaller every year.
No harm seemed to come to Delikta for
giving me the O and the ax had not yet fallen on Greg or Mike when my turn came to go
through the mediation motions.
I was struggling with crippling depression
and my nightmares of being in the kill zone with no way to fight had returned with a
vengeance.
The last time I had nightmares like that
was when I gave up on trying to get The Invisible Warriors published in 1991. Len
Olson, the young modeler I had, to my shame, slammed with the words, You cant
fuck up anything that I cant fix, was a good listener. When I told him about a
dream I had where I abandoned a taxi driver to killers only to be trapped in a hose where
they were coming after me, he told me that I was the taxi driver. He told me that I was
having the dreams because I was trying to run away from myself and I knew deep down that I
couldnt do. He said that I was a fighter and I knew I should still be fighting.
He was right. I started writing Random Factor. No more nightmares.
My new nightmares began with the August 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. I thought that the predictions I made in The Invisible Warriors had come to pass and still nobody was paying attention. The only thing I could think of that would get the medias attention was if somebody dropped an atomic bomb on Washington DC and killed enough reporters. One thing I new for sure was that the terrorists hadnt killed enough white Americans to do the trick.
I saw freaky parallels to my case and O.J.
Simpsons. Mark Fuhrman had to kill only two white people to become a key figure in
O.J.s murder trial. He become a best selling author because he killed the right two
and set himself up as the man who solved the case against O.J. and blew it with one bad
word he used in a private conversation. That case was driving much of what was happening
to me in the public perception of black people claiming they were victims of racism and
white racists claiming they were the victims of political correctness.
I was writing a book on O.J.s chief
accuser and having a tough time getting people to look at what I discovered about him and
O.J. when my lawyer sent me a summary of my case written by Fords lawyer. Martin
wanted me to skim Javiers version of my complaint to help him and the
Springer Lang attorney representing me prepare for my mediation session two weeks away.
Martin had six years to prepare a summery of my case. He let Springer and Lang do it
without my input for the class action certification. Now he was letting a Ford lawyer do
it for the mediation preceding the mini-trial and informing me, it seemed, as an
afterthought to cover his legal ass.
Javier framed the issues to make it appear
that I had nothing to complain about. There was no reference to any connection I had to
Ford prior to 1977 and therefore no reference to the ten years of seniority I said Ford
stole from me with its poison pill reinstatement offer after the 1967 layoff. I claimed
that I should be compared to the top ten percent of all the modelers Ford ever had.
Thats what made the dollars I was asking for relevant. Ford measured its top
performers in dollars and it had consistently paid me less than its mediocre modelers. I
was still below the midpoint of my pay grade with no hope of ever reaching the top.
With few exceptions, Ford compared me to
Larry Paluschak, Al Biggs and other pay grade-8s who started modeling nearly a generation
after I started with Ford. These people hadnt reached the midpoint of their careers
and Ford was using them because they were already making more money than I was. This was
the smoking gun in reference to what I said about Fords manipulation of the raises
on its combined Master Modeler list to make it appear that I got more than Paluschak did.
The real test could be made only over the next few years. That time had passed and
Paluschak was now making more than I was. Marten was content to let that fact show what
Ford wanted it to show that Paluschak and I belonged in the same salary comparison
group.
Serious thoughts of murder resurfaced in
my mind.
I told Martin what I thought of
Javiers summery and what I thought of him for accepting it and not telling me about
it until the last minute. His reply that Javier hadnt completed it until the last
minute scrambled my brainwaves. Where do you go from there? I went home.
The mediation was held at a Howard Johnson
motel. Thats where my new Springer and Lange attorney told me that the Chicago
company representing Ford was getting $1,000 an hour for the time it spent on the case. He
had done a ton of number crunching but couldnt squeeze more than $50,000 dollars or
so out of the comparison group.
I was openly hostile to Martin and the
Springer and Lang attorney until both of them surprised me with the energy, imagination
and hard work they threw into the proceedings. I reacted angrily to the comparison group
and blasted The Springer and Lang guy for dipping into a poison well until he explained
that he didnt like it, either. The judges order on how far back we could go to
define the group left no alternative. Martin, however, came up with an ingenious way to
give me my ten years of lost seniority and the Springer and Lange attorney built on that
architecture to increase the stakes for Fords refusal to go along with it.
It was a fair tradeoff but the Springer
and Lang attorney doubted that Ford would go for it. He had seen them in action and now
knew what the plaintiffs had been trying to tell his firm all along. Ford was guilty of
discriminating against its black salaried employees in a big way and its intransigence in
these last cases showed him a level of bad faith negotiating he had never seen before. If
the mediator could see it, he thought that we might have a chance to get somewhere.
The mediator did see it.
Javier started by apologizing to me for
not being included on the first promotion list. Marin sat straight up in his chair,
obviously stunned by the admission. It shocked me too until I realized it didnt mean
a thing in a proceeding where no records were kept and everyone was sworn to silence. I
couldnt say the same about Martins opening remarks.
Martin was so impressive that I wanted to stand up and applaud. He began by laying out my case in moral terms, stressing my integrity and my motives for pursuing the litigation. He concluded with this statement:
My client is a man of unusual
integrity. He feels that he can do fine in a fair system. He would accept one dollar if
Ford would just admit its mistake and fix the system.
Maybe Martin didnt get it before but
he got it now. I was deeply impressed. So was the mediator.
The session was split into several rounds
of discussions with everyone invited to participate. After each round the mediator met
separately with the lawyers for each side, growing more frustrated with Javier after each
round. He made an offer of $5,000 and stuck to it no matter what the mediator said. In the
open sessions the mediator became increasingly vexed by Fords intransigent position,
which was beginning to look like a personal affront to him as a black man and a former
judge. He let Javier get away with a lot of questionable assertions until he started
trotting out racial stereotypes to describe me that werent supported by the
evidence.
The mediator never lost his judicial cool
but he made it clear by his questions to me and to Javier that he didnt trust
Javier. In the end, Javier left him no logical alternative. His settlement offer went up
to $10,000 with a formal apology, no giveback of my lost seniority in any form, and no
change in the pay for performance system.
In 1999 Fords new Chairman of the
Board Jacques Nasser made a series of bold moves that had the finical markets buzzing
about Fords place as the industry leader in wise and profitable management
decisions. They praised him for lowering labor costs, bringing in the latest electronic
technology and educating Ford employees from top to bottom to use it. They praised him for
hiring the best management talent from auto companies in Germany and moving aggressively
to seek out other leaders and rid the company of deadwood. His cost cutting measures were
so ruthless that they affectionately dubbed him Jacques the Knife.
The value of Ford stock rose with each
announcement of the things Jacques did and planned to do that the market analysts said
were needed to increase shareholder value. He talked their talk, walked their
walk and educated his top executives to do likewise.
Increasing shareholder value became Jacques Nassers battle cry. Everyone attended more offsite meetings than ever to learn what the experts at top business schools like Harvard were teaching and the most profitable complies like General Electric were doing through a process called Business Leadership Initiative to increases shareholder value. We spent days in large groups at a remote motel doing BLI team building exercises and listening to speeches from high-level executives. Attendance was mandatory. Active participation was greatly encouraged.