He came up from the ranks. “I was in the apprentice school in Detroit. Then I moved over to the Highland Park plant and was a leader in the milling department. I was eighteen. They were all women and they gave me a fit. All had kids older than me. ‘Hey Whitey, come over here.’ They kidded the life out of me.” (Laughs.)
After the war he attended the University of Michigan and earned a degree in engineering. “Went to work for Ford Research.” Various moves —test engineer into quality control, processing . . . five moves around the country: St. Louis, Twin Cities, back to Detroit, Chicago. “I’ve been here three years.”
There’s a plaque on the desk: Ford, Limited Edition. “That was our five millionth car. There are about forty-five hundred people working here. That’s about 3,998 hourly and about 468 salaried.” Management and office employees are salaried.
You’re responsible to make sure the car is built and built correctly. I rely on my quality control manager. Any defects, anything’s wrong, we make sure it’s repaired before it leaves the plant. Production manager takes care of the men on the line, makes sure they’re doing their job, have the proper tools and the space and time to do it in. But the quality control manager is really our policeman. Quality control doesn’t look at every item on the car. Some by surveillance. You take a sample of five an hour. Some, we look in every car. They make sure we’re doing what we say we’re doing.
Okay, we’ve got to build forty-seven an hour. Vega, down in Lordstown, had a hundred an hour. They got trapped with too much automation. If you’re going to automate, you always leave yourself a loophole. I haven’t seen their picture. I want to show it to all my managers. Okay, we build 760 big Fords a day.
These things go out the door to the customer. The customer, he comes back to the dealer. The dealer comes back to us and the warranty on the policy. That’s the money the Ford company puts out to the dealer to fix any defects. We listen better. If the customer comes in and says, “I have a water leak,” the dealer’ll write up an 1863 and the company pays for that repair. Everybody’s real interested in keeping this down. We’ve been very fortunate. It’s been progressively getting better and better and better. In December, we beat $1.91. It’s unheard of for a two-shift plant to beat $1.91 in the warranty.
I’m usually here at seven o‘clock. The first thing in the morning we have a night letter—it’s from the production manager of the night shift. He tells us everything’s fine or we had a breakdown. If it was a major problem, a fire, I’d be called at home. It’s a log of events. If there’s any problem, I get the fellas, “What can we do about this? Is it fixed?” It’s eight o’clock in Detroit. I might get an early call.
Then I go out on the floor, tour the plant. We’ve got a million and a half square feet under the roof. I’ll change my tour—so they can’t tell every day I’m going to be in the same place at the same time. The worst thing I could do is set a pattern, where they’ll always know where I’ll be.
I’m always stopping to talk to foremen or hourly fellas. Or somebody’ll stop me, “I got a suggestion.” I may see a water leak, I say to the foreman, “Did you call maintenance?” Not do it myself, let him go do it. By the time I get back in the office, I have three or four calls, “Can you help me on this?” This is how you keep in contact.
Usually about nine thirty I’ve looked at our audit cars. We take eight cars, drive ’em, rewater ‘em, test ‘em put ’em on a hoist, check all the torque, take a visual check. We look over the complete car for eight of’em. Then there’s forty more each day that we go and convoy and take an expanded audit look.
We usually have a manpower meeting, we’ll go over our requirements for next week. In our cost meeting every Thursday afternoon, we have both shifts together. The operating committee meets usually every other day: my assistant plant manager; an operations manager, he has two production managers; a controller; an engineering manager; a quality control manager; and a materials manager. That’s the eight key figures in the plant.
We have a doctor. We like him here at ten o‘clock in the morning, so he overlaps into the night shift. There are four nurses and one standby. If there’s an accident, they’re the first one to go down. Is it carelessness? Is it our fault? Was there oil on the floor? Did they slip? Make sure everybody wears safety glasses. We provide them prescription lenses free—and safety shoes at a real good discount. If I went into the store to buy these, they’d probably run around $30. Here they’re only $11.50. And we bought 257 earmuffs in the body shop where we do a lot of welding and in various areas where we have compressed air. Or big blowoff stations. The federal government says you must provide ear protection for anybody in a high noise level area. We baffled all those. Some of the fellas said, “I’m not gonna wear ’em.” We said, “Either you wear ’em or you’re not gonna work here.” We’ve never had a hard of hearing comp case in all the years I’ve been with Ford.
We have a big project now on the spot-weld guns and manifolding of all our guns. The company’s paid a lot of money. Earplugs and earmuffs. A fella wears ’em and if it’s ninety degree temperature, okay, they get warm. I can appreciate that. I wouldn’t like to wear ’em all day myself. So what we’ve done on the big blowers is put insulation that thick. You can stand right next to it. We’re well within the noise level requirement. In the summertime, we have big 440 fans. They really move the air. It’s much cooler in the plant than it is on a ninety degree day outside.
We had an accident about two years ago, a fella on the trim line. He slipped and he hit his head and he was laying on the conveyer. They shut the line down. It didn’t start up again until the ambulance took him to the hospital. There isn’t any car worth a human arm or leg. We can always make a car. But if anybody’s hurt, an act of God—a human eye—my brother’s got only one eye. That’s why I’m a bug on safety glasses.
Three years ago, I had plenty of grievances. We had a lot of turnover, a lot of new employees. As many as 125 people would be replaced each week. Now with the economic situation, our last raises, and the seven days’ holiday between Christmas and New Year’s, this just changed the whole attitude. They found out it’s a real good place to work. They’re getting top dollar. Twelve paid vacation days a year, and they like the atmosphere. There was a lot of fellas would go in the construction industry about this time of the year. Less now.
I’ve had fellas come in to me and say, “I’m not satisfied. Can I talk to you about it?” I say, “Sure, come on in.” You can’t run a business sitting in the office ‘cause you get divorced too much from the people. The people are the key to the whole thing. If you aren’t in touch with the people they think, He’s too far aloof, he’s distant. It doesn’t work. If I walk down the line, there’ll be a guy fifty feet away from me. I’d wave, he’d wave back. Many of ’em I know by name. I don’t know everyone by name, but I know their faces. If I’m in the area, I’ll know who’s strange. I’ll kid with one of ’em . . .
(Indicates identification tag on his shirt) These are a real asset because we have a lot of visits from Detroit. They come in and somebody says, “Go see George Schuessler; he’s the chassis superintendent.” He may kind of forget. So he’ll look and see the name. We have a lot of new managers in the turnover. When they brought me in from Twin City, this was a real assist for me to have them walk in and say; “Good morning, Tom, how are you?” I’ve had a lot of ’em call me Mr. Brand—men I’ve known before in the other places. I said, “Look, has it changed since I moved from that office to this office?” So it’s worked. All the salaried people have tags, not the girls.
Not guys on the line?
We were thinkin’ about it, but too many of ’em leave ‘em home. It was a job gettin’ ‘em to bring their glasses every day and the key to their locker. Some are forgetful, some have a real good sense of responsibility. Others do a good job, but don’t want the responsibility. We’ve asked some of ’em, “How would you like to be a foreman?” “Naw, I don’t want any part of being a foreman. I want to be one of the boys.”
We’ve got about forty-five percent black in the plant. I would say about twenty-five percent of the salaried are black. We’ve got some wonderful ones, some real good ones. A lot of ‘em were very militant about three years ago—the first anniversary of Martin Luther King’s—about the year I got here. Since that time we haven’t had any problem. Those that may be militant are very quiet about it. They were very outspoken before. I think it’s more calmed down. Even the younger kids, black and white, are getting away from real long hair. They’re getting into the shaped and tailored look. I think they’re accepting work better, more so than in years previous, where everything was no good. Every manufacturer was a pollutant, whether it be water, the air, or anything, “The Establishment’s doing it.” I don’t hear that any more.
“My dad worked for Ford when they started in 1908. He got to be a superintendent in the stock department. They called ‘em star badges in those days. One day jokingly I took his badge with the star on it and left him mine. I almost got shot. (Laughs.) My brother worked for Ford. My son works at the Twin City plant. He’s the mail boy. In the last two summers he’s been working in the maintenance department, cleaning the paint ovens and all the sludge out of the pits. He said, ’You got the best job in Chicago and I got the worst job in Twin City.’ (Laughs.) He was hourly then, dirty work. Mail boy, well, that’s salaried. He’s going to school nights. He’s learning a lot.”
On Tuesdays at two thirty is the 1973 launch meetings, new models. It’s March and the merry-go-round conveyers are already in. It’s a new type of fixture. This is where we build all the front ends of the car. Between Christmas and New Year’s we put in the foundation under the floor. Usually every other year there’s a model change. Next year everything goes. Sixty-eight hundred parts change.
“My boss is the regional manager in Detroit. He has seven assembly plants. Over him is the assistant general manager. Over him is our vice president and general manager. Assembly is one division. There’s the Glass Division, Transportation Division, Metal-stamping Division . . .”
Assembly’s the biggest division. We’re the cash register ringers. The company is predicated on the profit coming off this line. Knock on wood, our plant maintenance people do a remarkable job. When we get ’em off the line they go to the dealer and to the customer. And that’s where the profit is.
When I’m away I’m able to leave my work behind. Not all the time. (Indicates the page boy on his belt) Some nights I forget and I suddenly discover at home I’ve got the darn thing on my belt. (Laughs.) We just took a fourteen-day Caribbean cruise. They sent me a telegram: “Our warranty for December, $1.91. Enjoy yourselves.” That’s better than some single-shift plants in quality.
I don’t think I’ll retire at fifty. I’m not the type to sit around. Maybe if my health is good I’ll go to fifty-seven, fifty-nine. I enjoy this work very much. You’re with people. I like people. Guys who really do the job can spot a phony. When I walk out there and say good morning, you watch the fellas. There’s a world of difference if they really know you mean it.
Doing my job is part salesmanship. I guess you can term it human engineering. My boss, so many years past, used to be a real bull of the woods. Tough guy. I don’t believe in that. I never was raised that way. I never met a guy you couldn’t talk to. I never met a man who didn’t put his pants on the same way I do it in the morning. I met an awful lot of ‘em that think they do. It doesn’t work. The old days of hit ’em with a baseball bat to get their attention—they’re gone.
If I could get everybody at the plant to look at everything through my eyeballs, we’d have a lot of the problems licked. If we have one standard to go by, it’s easy to swing it around because then you’ve got everybody thinking the same way. This is the biggest problem of people—communication.
It’s a tough situation because everybody doesn’t feel the same every day. Some mornings somebody wakes up with a hangover, stayed up late, watched a late, late movie, missed the ride, and they’re mad when they get to work. It’s just human nature. If we could get everybody to feel great . . .
WHEELER STANLEY
“I’m probably the youngest general foreman in the plant, yes, sir.” He was invited to sit in the chair of the plant manager as Tom Brand went about his work. “I’m in the chassis line right now. There’s 372 people working for us, hourly. And thirteen foremen. I’m the lead general foreman.”
He grew up in this area, “not more than five minutes away. I watched the Ford plant grow from when I was a little boy.” His father is a railroad man and he is the only son among four children. He is married and has two small children.
He has just turned thirty. He appears always to be “at attention.” It is not accidental. “I always had one ambition. I wanted to go in the army and be a paratrooper. So I became a paratrooper. When I got out of the army, where I majored in communications, I applied at Illinois Bell. But nobody was hiring. So I came out here as an hourly man. Ten years ago. I was twenty.”
I was a cushion builder. We made all the seats and trim. I could comprehend it real easy. I moved around considerably. I was a spot-welder. I went from cushion to trim to body shop, paint. I could look at a job and I could do it. My mind would just click. I could stand back, look at a job, and five minutes later I can go and do it. I enjoyed the work. I felt it was a man’s job. You can do something with your hands. You can go home at night and feel you have accomplished something.
Did you find the assembly line boring?
No, uh-uh. Far from boring. There was a couple of us that we were hired together. We’d come up with different games—like we’d take the numbers of the jeeps that went by. That guy loses, he buys coffee. I very rarely had any problems with the other guys. We had a lot of respect for each other. If you’re a deadhead when you’re an hourly man and you go on supervision, they don’t have much use for you. But if they know the guy’s aggressive and he tries to do a job, they tend to respect him.