Bill Ford Urges UAW to End Strike in ’Personal’ Appeal

Ford Chairman Bill Ford took to a live-stream Monday for the first time since the UAW struck Detroit’s three automakers on Sept. 15, chastising union leadership for referring to the 120-year-old company as “the enemy” and warning that an already post-COVID-19 supply chain is fragile and could collapse in certain areas if the strike continues much longer.

The great-grandson of Henry Ford emphasized his bonafides as “pro-union” while speaking at the Rouge plant in Ford’s hometown of Dearborn.

On his long-standing support of union organizing, Ford says: “It aligns with my personal values, the values of our company and our history. We believe in building in America. Every set of negotiations has been challenging.  But at the end of the day, we have always recognized that we are all Ford, and we fail or succeed together.”

The UAW last week struck Ford’s Kentucky Truck Plant, which is Ford's largest plant in the world in terms of workforce, and one of the largest automobile plants in the world. The complex makes the F-Series Super Duty, Ford Expedition and Lincoln Navigator, and accounts for an estimated $25 billion in annual revenue.

“The UAW leaders have called us the enemy in these negotiations,” Ford says. “But I will never consider our employees as enemies. It should not be Ford vs. the UAW. It should be Ford and the UAW vs. Toyota, Honda, Tesla and all the Chinese companies that want to enter our home market. Toyota, Honda and the others are loving this strike because they know the longer it goes on, the better it is for them. They will win, and all of us will lose.” Toyota’s largest U.S. plant is in Georgetown, KY, and the UAW has never succeeded in organizing Asian plants in the U.S.

UAW President Shawn Fain, who has been the most combative and bellicose UAW president in decades, said on Friday the union would not expand the strike immediately against the Detroit Three automakers, but left open the possibility that he would at any time. Fain, in a Facebook Live appearance, called this a “new phase” in the union's fight against General Motors, Ford and Stellantis. Fain also said the union will no longer wait until Fridays during the strike to announce new plants on its walk-out list.

The UAW’s current demands include a 40% pay increase; a four-day work week with overtime pay beyond 32 hours; union representation at new electric battery plants; and the end of employment tiers that created two classes of employees – one older that is better paid and receives more benefits and a second, younger tier that was hired after 2007. Fain so far is not backing off from that position.

Meantime, Ford notes his company’s offer is a “record contract that will make our UAW employees among the best-paid manufacturing workers in the world.”

The reason for the chairman’s remarks was to connect with rank-and-file union members, many of whom are from multi-generational families who have worked at the automaker in Michigan and still call the company “Ford’s” because of the company’s century-plus family ownership and control.

It was meant also to light a fire under legislators and the Biden Admin. to lean on the UAW leadership. ““Building things in America matters now more than ever, especially in these uncertain times,” Ford says.

“In my lifetime, I have watched countries lose their auto industry and virtually all industries after that. Countries that once had vibrant industrial bases no longer make anything. They become dependent on others for critical products, aspects of their supply chain and even national defense,” the Ford chairman says.

Ford depends on the profits of its industry-leading pickup truck business, as well as the sales of SUVs, to fund its expanding electric-vehicle strategy. A combination of lost profits from its traditional internal-combustion-engine business on top of investments in its so-far profitless EV business could devastate Ford’s earnings this year.

A prolonged strike would put Ford’s future at risk, Ford says. Wall Street is already growing skittish about the loss of production and threats to Ford’s financial stability. “Reduction in capital spending, delayed EV targets, greater sharing of costs and other changes to the corporate ‘portfolio’ could be on the horizon,” Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas tells clients in an Oct. 12 note.

The strikes have thus far cost GM and Ford more than $500 million, JP Morgan analyst Ryan Brinkman estimates in a Monday note to investors and stakeholders. That means Ford is losing $44 million a day, while GM is losing $21 million a day, Brinkman says. Those per-day numbers will grow worse in an expanded strike.

"Go get the big checkbook,” Fain said when he was told Ford’s best offer was on the table. “The one Ford uses when it wants to spend millions on company executives or Wall Street giveaways.”

Executive pay has been a hot-button social-media talking point for the UAW and union backers such as Clinton Admin. Labor Secretary Robert Reich and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, pillorying GM and Ford for pay packages for Ford CEO Jim Farley and GM CEO Mary Barra.

Barra made $29 million in 2022, per company filings, 362 times the median GM worker pay. The same year, Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares made $24.8 million, also from company filings, or 365 times the average worker pay; and Ford Farley made $21 million, or 281 times the median worker pay, according to Ford filings.

U.S. companies’ CEO pay is more hinged to performance than that of CEOs in other countries. For example, in 2022, Tavares's salary – or fixed pay – accounted for just 9% of his total take when stock and bonuses are factored in.

While Ford does not compete with Asian and European automakers for CEO talent, it does compete against other U.S. companies for executive talent and so it is bound by the current U.S. system. But the CEO pay issue has played to the UAW’s advantage in social media when it comes to public sentiment about the strike.

General sympathy for the workers also breaks along party lines in the U.S. as both Democratic President Joe Biden and the Republican candidates trying to unseat him talk about the strike almost daily.  More than half of Democrats (55%) say they support the workers over the automakers, while only 22% of Republicans feel that way in a poll conducted in September by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.