daro31

I did a 6 months in the trenches as a Ford Service Advisor, and I can tell you that most people stop at the, it is not under warranty, sorry we can't help you step! There you stand seeming knowledgable as a Ford Motor Company rep and most people just figure you can't fight city hall. One morning a customer came to me with a very rough running F-350 Diesel. After spending a little over $500 for diagnosis I advised him that he needed the injector pump rebuilt and all injectors replaced at a cost of about $3500. He reluncantly agreed after informing me that numorous freinds who had similar vehicles at the horse track had similar issues and he thought perhaps Ford migh have some ongoing issues and there might be a secret program or something to help him out. I kicked him up to the service manager where he was told the same story, sorry buddy can't help you. He agreed to the repairs. At that time late 80's we were just getting the computer system up and running were you could enter a vehicle V.I.N. and get any secret or published recalls. We were just being trained and the system wasn't officially on line, so I thought I would get out the manual and try this customers V.I.N. Go figure, recall to rebuild injector pump and replace injectors. Being the simpletom that I am I immediate called my customer and informed him of the good news. I went and informed the service manager of the issue, and his reply, was to swear at me, call me names and tell me what a fool I was, this customer had race horses, could afford it, would have paid it himself and I had better get out and sell about 10,000 dollars of non-warranty work to make up for my stupidity. Fortunately I knew this was a short term job while I looked for something more in line with my manuifacturing engineering training and already had a job lined up, I got to hand him my resignation just as he was about to fire me for telling the customer his good fortune. Service guys brag about the biggest repair they could foist on a customer, not only were we paid a higher commision on repairs that are non-warranty, but the dealership was watched by Ford for it's ratio of warranty to non-warranty work. If you could not keep the non-warranty work up you have the area manager breathing down your neck.

I worked at S.T.A.P, as a kid out of grade 12, I had a choice, cub reporter photographer $115.00 a week. or Assembly line at $400 + a week, with all the mandatory overtime a person could stand. We didn't have that many automotive manufacturing companies in this area so the Ford wages where pretty spectacular.

Once again this is were the Big 3 have gone off track. They know what needs to be done they just won't take on the people and make them do it. If you are a supplier to the Big 3 you are required to be TS16949:2002 approved to get business from them. One of the requirents of TS is that you have a system of preventative and PREDICTIVE maintenance. By the way the Big 3 wrote the TS requirement, so I wonder why they don't follow it themselves, but that is a story for another day. TS16949:2002 section 7.5.1.4 Preventative Maintenance The organization shall identify key process equipment and provide resources for machine/equipment maintenance and develop an effective planned total preventative maintenance system. As a minumun , this system shall include the following. - planned maintenance activities. - availability of replacement parts for key manufacturing equipmemt; - documenting, evaluating and improving maintenance objectives. The organization shall utilize predictive maintenance methods to continually improve the effectiveness and the efficiency of production equipment. Predictive maintenance means that you figure out how to fix things on non-production time. You change motors and bearing before they burn out by monitoring, noise of bearings, heat, vibration or what ever indicator is appropriate for the machine. I have a freind in a Toyota plant and it took a long time for him to get used to changing out what seemed like a perfectly good 20 hp motor. But it was done when scheduled and saved expensiver downtime. There is lots of routine maintenance and preventative maintenance in a big auto assembly plant, but nmost tradesman would rather be firefighters, and save the day or hold the line hostage. If you are supplier to the big 3 they require this, so why don't they do it themselves. Once again, is it about what the managers are willing to accept as the way of doing business, if your trades people are sitting on their hands, no-value added; then it is because the management has decided to accept that and role the costs into the product. Maybe if they are not making money, they need to decide that some of these costs are not sustainable.

I read the last post and I guess just as I thought the culture of the company hasn't changed much. You really can't expect it to, after all the guys at the top got there by doing what was expected, and that was to tell em what they wanted to hear above. I really don't know how you can change that culture of playing the game, when all the best at it are the guys who make the decisions. When I went to Dearborn for my Production Supervisors course the last day the instructor walked into the room and took out a big hunk of chalk. On the blackboard he wrote in 4 foot high letters, "C" "Y" "A". yep plain as day. He said I call this next to days CYA. "Cover Your Ass. or subtitled "Survival In The Ford Motor Company. Like I said, you really can't blame management, they are just doing what they were taught and rewarded for.

It seems to be an ongoing point of discussion on this board and may other automotive forums and blogs, the amount of money that autoworkers are paid. First my background so you know from whence I speak. 10 years on a Ford assembly line, then 10 years as a production supervisor on the same line, finally out of there and off to school to become a Quality engineer, then Supervisor then Manager at a parts supplier to the big 3. Not all-inclusive, but certainly I have had my feet in most of the pools near the production floor. Everyone should realise that every thing the workers have at some point the company and the union signed a deal and the companies decided after consulting with their finance people who were sitting at the bargaining table with their spreadsheets, plugging in the numbers. As a supervisor I had a process book at my desk with every operation from time to walk to the car, to time to screw in a bolt timed down to the 10th of a minute. The car companies know to the penny what labor it takes to build a car, so labor is no surprise amount. The company also knows the absenteeism rate in a plant and has over the years decided to accept that at a 10%-15% rate. You can be sure that is in the spreadsheet as well. Back in the late 60’s when I started on the line, it was the best pay cheque in the area by about 3 times. When I think back to the fact that at 19 years old, still living at home, I could save 6 pay cheques, then on the day my new VW Super Beatle came in go to the bank, cash them, plunk down 22, 100 bills and have a car paid for it was pretty good. (Sorry guys but I built Pinto’s with dumb dumb and black tape 56 hours a week I wasn’t going to drive one home). The part no one tells you about are how you had to work in a new plant in those days. The day I started it was with 127 men. Mandatory 56-hour weeks, shift work with hours that was like none of your friends and bosses who thought they would be the next plant manager if they were the meanest S.O.B. in the place. The line paid so well because it had to. Within 6 months, of the 127 men I started with there was 2 of us left and the other guy used to come and tell me while leaning on his broom how stupid I was to still be on the line, when you could get a K14 restriction and get off. After a couple of years on the line I really knew I didn’t want to be doing that boring monotonous work for the rest of my life, I was going crazy with trying to shut off my brain for 10 hours a day. Every time I hear some manager say the solution to quality is for the guy on the line to pay attention I want to hand him a box of paper clips and ask him to find me the bent one. As a quality manager I have asked management in my plants numerous times to spend one day on the assembly line so that they have a clue, never had a taker yet. I wanted some support from my wife, to go back to school and so I asked her to try one thing for me. Anyone want to give this a go and then report back on what you would have to be paid to do this, let us know. At 5:30 in the evening, start setting the table, one place setting from the cupboard, and then over to the utensil drawer and set the silver ware in the exact order I tell you. Then put it all away. You have 54 seconds to do that. Now do it again, same cycle 63 times an hour. In a couple of hours I will have the neighbor come over and give you a washroom break. You have a 21-minute break and a 14-minute break before 11:30 pm, and don’t be a minute late. At 11:30 you can have a half hour for lunch. Again at midnight we start setting the table and putting it away with another 35 minutes worth of breaks in 5 hours. Oh yes and there will be noise so loud that you can’t talk to anyone or hear anyone, no radio on, and in the summer 100 degrees. Now look forward to doing that for the next 30 years. I bet no many people commenting on automotive workers pay would do it for long. Yes it is true, everyone knows that the union spends most of its time protecting the D…F…’s, but that has been going on for so long with people being paid not to work, that surely it should have made it into the accounting spreadsheets by now and calculated in the cost of labour. If it isn’t then that is the companies’ fault as well. If the Big 3 car companies are in financial trouble and it has anything to do with labor costs then it is because management plays continual games. Production managers play games with line speeds and production rates; quality people play games with their numbers and suppliers. Executives play games with expense accounts and gamesmanship is rewarded with promotions and more opportunities to play higher stakes games. In the end the controls are on fake situations and everyone is playing hide the weenie. At the end of the day, the companies whose name is on the cheque is responsible for everything and I have absolutely no faith in the Big 3 to survive because they don’t really know what they are dealing with and they don’t want to know. Everyone in the chain just reports what he or she wants to hear at the top. Even if they do make some tough decisions it won’t be addressing the real reasons for failure. It didn’t used to matter because everyone played the same games. Well the suppliers don’t, the big 3 won’t let them, and the import companies don’t; sorry big 3 the rules have changes and you aren’t in the game anymore.

I was in manageament when the Japanese first became a visible threat to the Big 3. Ford managers took all of the supervisors over to a 3 cars they had brought into the plant. A Honda Cicvic, VW Rabbit and Toyota Corolla. We were shown all of the fine points of quality, even margins, well fitting trim and no gaps in panels. No system damage to the paint and neat wire routings. I guess I sealed my fate with a future at Ford when I said, we just put together the parts you give us, this kind of quality is designed in. We had to take all of our assemblers to these cars and tell them how if we did not build our cars with the same attention to details as those cars that the future of the Ford Motor Company was in jeporady. That was at the same time when quality was somehow tied to singing the company song, morning exercises and ping pong tables. Funny how all the high priced help in management in 1980 saw this impending crisis and yet chose to not do anything about it. Of course the same day, everyone in the plant knew that rad fill had gone down for an hour and we continued to roll test cars with no coolant. I remember thinking at the time, are theses guys in management really that stupid or do they think the people they hire are. As I used to say, "Ford has a Better Idea", but there saving it because it's the last one.

A Brief History of Ford – From the Trenches I have just come across this board in the last few months and have been reading it with great interest. Ford won me over as a great company and caught my interest when I was in public school. All through my working life I have remained interested in the history and future of FoMoCo. Maybe because it has a real mans name on the signs and you can visit his house. In Grade 7 my class trip was to Greenfield Village and the Rouge Steel Complex. I came away awestruck by the steel ovens, the rolling mills the size, the noise, the heat and the immensity of it all. My impressions of manufacturing that day haves never left me. I remember standing on a catwalk hundreds of feet away from the ovens and my teacher’s dessert boot soles melting on the catwalk. Huge ribbons of steel flying out of the rolling mill soon after being a red hot block as large as a rail car. The same day we toured a car assembly plant, and was amazed to see a car come together in a couple of hours. My father was a mechanic and I was on the creeper beside him from as young as I can remember, so I guess I was born a car guy. When I got out of school at 19 years old, I had 2 job opportunities, a cub reporter photographer for a small town newspaper at $80.00 a week or assembler at the new STAP plant at $380.00 a week with all of the mandatory overtime we could stand. We don’t always make the best choices at 19 years old do we? I can remember to this day my first day walking into work at Ford, man it was cool so big and all the new cars. I think we were all led to believe we would become test drivers at orientation, kind of like the way they got the Jews into the gas ovens for a badly needed shower. For people who have never worked on a line and complain about the high pay I think they should try and do it for a day and then complain. I remember trying to put the whole engine wiring harness into an engine compartment in 56 seconds while walking bent over touching my toes in Pinto’s and Mavericks, plastic clips that wouldn’t go in without shattering, flash from spot welds getting under your finger nails and after a few months headaches that wouldn’t go away. I think I ran for 3 weeks, 56 hours a week before I could keep up with the line. How many people have ever done a job where they passed out, and came to on the floor with their supervisor, kicking them and swearing at them to get up and get your lazy ass on the line and get caught up? It was a new plant; management saw themselves as the next plant manager if they could be the meanest S.O.B. in the place. By the way I asked for medical relief, and was sent a relief man who said I was to go to the supervisor’s office first. There I had my first run in with the UAW at that time. I was charged with poor workmanship for missing the engine harnesses in 3 cars while I was passed out. The union rep didn’t even speak a word in my defense. So much for my introduction to the union! Is it any wonder that from the day I started with 127 men on the same day, after 4 months there was only 2 of us who had not quit from that date and the other one had already managed to get a K14 restriction and used to visit me and lean on his broom and tell me I was stupid to keep working so hard. After about 5 years I was offered a Supervisors job when I told my foreman I was going to quit and have a go at my own business. With a mortgage and a young family the pay looked pretty good and I would be away from the boredom of the line. I look back on it now at 56 years old and wonder what was that General Foreman thinking offering a 25 year old kid a foreman’s job in that dog eats dog Ford management system. Off the line I began to see why the supervisors look so dumb to the hourly people, the system controlled every decision, and the company had built in ways to antagonize the workers. Management didn’t want cooperation; they wanted grievances to trade off at contract time. I once lost a raise because I didn’t write up a guy whose name they had given me during morning meeting. Every supervisor got a guys name that morning to have a written reprimand on the superintendent’s desk before they went home that night. I was young and dumb, I didn’t realize that most foremen just made something up and worked with a committeeman they had in their pocket. In 1980, management knew that these days we have now would be on us. I don’t think it was a clear picture, but they knew sometime the waste and lack of concern for the customer and product would catch up. We were building Pintos when the magic of the Japanese quality stuck. The company brought in a Honda Civic, Toyota and VW Rabbit. First management took all the supervisor’s over to these cars in the repair area and went over the details of fit, finish, door and hood margins, seat stitching, wire routing, paint finish and overall quality. We were told to impress on our hourly workers how important that it was to the plants future that they build a car with equal quality or their futures would not be assured. I guess my future with Ford was probably sealed when I remarked to my Superintendent that if you give me parts for a Pinto and I put it together perfect at the end of the line it is still a Pinto. I said to him quality is designed in; the guy on the line can only put together the parts we give him. Most of the parts were Ford supplied in my area and they didn’t fit well. Thank goodness for black dum dum, wide tape, hammers and holes saws. I used to think we were building custom cars. During that period we heard about how the Japanese shut the line down to repair cars, that each worker had the ability to stop the line if he suspected a quality issue in the unit he was working on. At that time the plant was down for an extended period due to poor sales. The plant manager came back from a big meeting in Dearborn, management had a revelation and there had been a conversion, quality was the key to our future. All plants would adopt the system of shutting the line down for quality issues. I can remember all the supervisors in the room trying to picture this happening and thinking what a great idea. It would mean we could go home after shift, not have to go to the repair hole every night with some people trying to clean up the days mess. Sure enough, the plant manager left the room after saying that the Production Manager would explain the details. Details were simple; he leaned over the podium, stared for about 10 seconds and said, these are the details, “The first one of you F…. A…..H….. that shuts a line down had better have other employment lined up. So much for the new respect for quality; it never happened although the newspapers were all full of this new quality conversion from Ford. If you guys who work in the plants look back to the late 70’s and early 80’s you will find there was not a day that the papers did not have an article about how dedicated the Japanese workers were to quality and their companies. Remember ping pong tables and morning exercises were supposed to be the answer. Well here it is 2006 and all of the management predictions of the future of the company are coming true, so how come with all of that high priced help they couldn’t implement solutions that they knew about 30 years ago. In the last 20 years I have worked in Quality Management for Ford suppliers, and they have implemented piles of systems, management controls, engineering and quality requirements that they could never meet themselves. It is all “do as I say not as I do.†At the end of the day, everyone in management is blaming workers, workers blaming management and no on taking responsibility. One thing I know is that over the years I have worked with brilliant dedicated engineers, skilled trades that could fix anything with wire and tape to keep the line running, dedicated line workers who were proud and skilled and management people who came in with great enthusiasm and skills. Unfortunately the good people soon get frustrated with the system and leave it, or join the good old boys network and conform. Either way the huge old system that has taken 100 years to develop eats them up and it wins. Example, in 1980 during Escort development, we couldn’t get a new pencil with out turning in the stub of the old one and having a requisition signed by God due to cost controls. I went to the pilot plant in Dearborn to help with Escort A/C systems. We needed a car body that was in the solder booth. It was 10:30 in the morning. I was told we couldn’t have it until 1:00. It seems that the warming plate for the solder was also great for cooking lunch, and everyone knew that the workers warmed their lunch on it starting at 11:00. No one in management seemed to object, so we all went across the street for a 2 hour lunch. I hope someone has suggested a microwave for those guys, if they haven’t already died of lead poisoning. In those days people thought no one could touch them, waste didn’t matter because a new bucket of money would arrive next day. Be sure and spend just over budget so you can ask for more next year. Well those guys are at the top now, and you really can’t blame them if the way they were trained to do business got them to the top. One thing Ford never liked was stepping outside the lines, every guy who ever tried it got run down. I have never again made the money I made at Ford, but I have gotten job satisfaction, a sense of accomplishment and opportunities to step outside the lines I would never have has if I had stayed there. As a Production Manager once said to a group of foreman, we pay you enough to get your soul, and if you don’t want the money there is a thousand guys who do. I hope Ford stays alive, too many good people have dedicated too much to it, but I don’t know if it can survive its own momentum.

I was a supervisor at a CAW shop that closed in London ON. It did get some bad press at the time that the union had turned down a deal in spite of the company threatening to close if the contract was not accepted. It was not an automotive shop however it was CAW. I went on to another automotive supplier that was expanding and hiring. As a supervisor I wanted to hire some of the employees from the shop that had closed and I knew were good people. After going directly to the Human Resources people and vouching for the hourly people I wanted to bring on board I was told that the word was out amongst all of the Human Resources people in this area not to hire anybody from the plant that closed because they were union trouble makers. I bet there was only about 10 people out of the 150 that lost their jobs that caused the headlines but that is all it took. I put up a loud prtotest and promised that I would take vouch 100% for the people I referanced but still could not get them jobs. It wasn't fair at all but it sure does happen. Human resources people network and they have thier blacklists.

I havn't worked at STAP for a lot of years, got caught in the downturn back in 1981, but I have stayed in the automotive business and have found it interesting to watch how little progress has been made over the years by the brilliant management team. I really have to laugh when I see these announcements from the managers, don't they get it yet. The same letters came out back then when the plants production was being challenged by the quality and dedication of the Japanese carmakers whoses employees where singing the company song, touching their toes in the morning and playing ping pong on their breaks. I wonder if they have a file somewhere were all of these letters are kept and they just recycle them with a new date and the buzzwords of the year? I bet not one of those guys who write those letters has ever spent a 10 hour day with a drive shaft over his head, or crawled in and out of a Pinto full of spot weld flash ripping his knees up. I would really have thought by now that things like absenteeism, defects getting out of the station, and more time spent in the repair hole than on the line for lots of cars would be a thing of the past. I was once in a meeting were these same things were being pushed, for supervisors to get control of. The biggest thing that came out of Detroit was the new policy of no vehicle leaving it's station with a defect, the line would be shut down and the defect repaired. That was the announcement from the Plant Manager, then the Production Manager walked in the room, leaned over the podium and announced that the first Supervisor who shut a line down for a deffect had better have a new job lined up, and that meeting was over. So any wonder 25 years later they still have the same problem, and they pay those brilliant managers how much?