From: Jasper
Date: 6/24/01
Time: 11:51:44
AM
Jean,
I'm in a lawsuit with Ford right now. That's one of the reasons I 've been so busy. All I can tell you is that I tried to tell the older, white, male salaried workers this was coming in 1992 when Ford systematically went after its black salaried workers. If they could get away with doing it to us they could get away with doing it to anybody.
Because of hiring and promotion policies going back over 50 years, the highest paid people in the company are older white males. Now that the company is trying to squeeze out its older salaried employees and replace them with younger, cheaper, more compliant workers, the most vulnerable group is naturally older, white, males. There never were that many women or African-Americans to begin with in those ranks. Then the company went after older black men and women (the tiny minority that was hired and permitted to advance in the '60s) leaving, guess who? Older white males. There are, for example, zero black Master Modelers in the entire company now that the one who was promoted to take my place has retired. The new replacements for all of the people being force to retire are young white men, young white women and young men and women of Latin and Asian ancestry.
The outline of this approach by the company is in the documents I submitted to the court in '94. The judge IMMEDIATELY put a gag order on me and my fellow plaintiffs making it illegal for us to go to the press with any proof or our allegations. That is, we can say whatever we want. Ford can deny it. And we will be subject to sever penalties if we show anyone the documents that will prove we were telling the truth. That's why you see so many grinning black people these day in ads and contrived "news" stores for Ford.
The truth is Ford has found a cute way of lowering its salary cost in its most highly skilled technical and managerial positions. The way the law is set up, they can't discriminate against any class of people who have been historically discriminated against (women, blacks, older workers). However, they can and do use one group as a statistical counterweight to INDIVIDUAL claims of discrimination by members of any group. In other words, if a woman claims she is being denied advancement because she is a women, all the company is required to do by law is to show that a man (one-for-one comparison) is being treated the same or worse (because both are inferior employees, naturally). They don't have to say if the man is another member of a protected class. You can pull the same stunt with an older white man by comparing him to a black man or a woman.
Yes Jean, I know a lot about this issue. I saw it coming in 1990 and it's one of the things that inspired me to write The Random Factor series. Much of what you'll read about "Condor Broadcasting International" in The Random Factor, Doing Without and Messiah, come straight out of my experience at Ford.
In this case the future was easy to see. --Jasper