American Icon (41 page)
Authors: Bryce G. Hoffman
Joe Laymon, Vice President of Human Resources and Labor Affairs
Mike Bannister, Chairman and CEO, Ford Credit
Derrick Kuzak, Vice President of Global Product Development
Bennie Fowler, Vice President of Global Quality
Jim Farley, Vice President of Global Marketing, Sales and Service
Ray Day, Vice President of Communications
Ziad Ojakli, Vice President, Government and Community Relations Quality
Tony Brown, Vice President of Global Purchasing
United Auto Workers president Ron Gettelfinger and Alan Mulally begin formal negotiations on a new national contract on July 23, 2007. The two men had actually been talking secretly for months. Ford’s lead negotiators, Martin Mulloy and Joe Hinrichs, are seated to Mulally’s left.
Ford executives hold one of their daily Special Attention Review (SAR) meetings in the Thunderbird Room at World Headquarters on December 1, 2008, during the depths of the crisis. Pictured (
from left
) are Ford Americas Controller Bob Shanks, President of the Americas Mark Fields, President and CEO Alan Mulally, Chief Financial Officer Lewis Booth, General Counsel David Leitch, and Vice President of Global Manufacturing and Labor Affairs Joe Hinrichs.
Alan Mulally and Bill Ford with the all-new 2012 Ford Focus, the car that would embody Mulally’s global “One Ford” vision for the company.
WatershedYou’ve been fighting General Motors and the Wall Street crowd. Now you are in here, and we have given you a union shop and more than you got out of them. That puts you on our side doesn’t it? We fight General Motors and Wall Street together, eh?
—H
ENRY
F
ORD
to United Auto Workers leader Walter Reuther
F
or decades, Ford Motor Company had enjoyed a better relationship with the United Auto Workers than either General Motors or Chrysler. This was due largely to the mutual respect between the union and the Ford family, which was a bit ironic considering that their bond was baptized in blood.
Henry Ford’s $5-a-day wage may have made him the best friend the workingman ever had, but his relationship with his employees was always paternalistic. He cared about their welfare in the same way a kindly nobleman might have cared about his serfs. But he spurned their efforts to bargain with him on equal footing. Ford knew he treated his workers better than any other industrialist in the world, and he resented the idea that they might need a union to mediate with him on their behalf. He did everything in his power to block the early attempts to organize his factories in the 1930s. In 1932, Ford security guards and Dearborn police officers opened fire on workers demonstrating outside the River Rouge complex, killing four and wounding more than fifty. The passage of President Franklin Roosevelt’s National Industrial Recovery Act in 1933, which gave workers the right to collective bargaining, did little to change Ford’s mind.
*
“
Labor unions are the worst things that ever struck the earth,” Ford declared after the UAW used sit-down strikes to force GM and Chrysler to recognize the union. And he used Harry Bennett’s infamous Service Department, with its small army of thugs and spies, to keep them out of his factories even after the rest of the American automobile industry had capitulated. In 1937, Bennett’s goons attacked a UAW march led by Walter Reuther on an overpass leading to the Rouge factory—the same pedestrian bridge that had been the scene of the 1932 violence. Reuther and several others were badly beaten in what became known as “the Battle of the Overpass.” It turned public sentiment against Ford and brought growing pressure from Washington. After his workers managed to shut down the Rouge in 1941, Ford finally relented and signed his first contract with the UAW.