JethroFDX

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By Steve Wilson
November 14, 2006
Their companies may be flying through some very turbulent times and thousands of southeast Michigan workers are headed for a hard landing, but way up in the sky a number of auto industry CEO’s are still flying as high as ever.
Just so there’s no confusion: we’re talking about top executives using corporate jets for non-business purposes, trips that are purely personal—and costing troubled auto companies big money.
Couple that with the fact many of them have promised necessary sacrifices will be shared from bottom to top and here you’ve got what many are saying is the height of hypocrisy at companies where so many loyal workers and retirees alike are being hit hard.
At the troubled Ford Motor company where the blue-collar and salaried workforce alike is about to shrink by a third, the Way Forward is clear:
Mark Fields, Executive VP of Ford Motor Co, said in August, "We’re changing our culture to adopt a change or die mentality that is rejecting business as usual."

Ford’s Fields is widely credited with steering the company’s Mazda division on a more-successful course a few years back and now he’s the one charged with engineering the company-wide cuts, the plant closings, and the painful elimination of thousands of jobs.
Still, Ford’s top leadership insists, "We’ll do everything we can to ease the burdens." Those were the words of Ford Chairman William Clay Ford. "We all have to change and we all have to sacrifice but I believe this is the path to winning," Ford has said.
Industry experts like David Cole at the respected Center for Auto Research,
and Ford employees alike, widely believe—or perhaps many just hope—
that company chiefs are keeping their promises so, as Ford personally pledged, the burdens on families and communities can be eased as much as possible.
And so far, Mark Fields’ Way Forward has been a much steeper uphill drive than he planned. First, he said the company would be profitable again in two years, but now, he concedes it’ll be at least three—and far-deeper cuts are needed just to keep the company on the road.
In fairness, the road is much rockier than most expected, perhaps due mostly to circumstances beyond his control. So, last year, he still collected a million-dollar bonus—part of a pay package that totaled well over $3 million.
"In some cases you have ‘critical-skill people’ that the company can’t function without. That might be in tool making, could be a UAW employee," explains David Cole. We asked Cole whether he felt Mark Fields was among those employees. "Uh, I don’t think so," he said.
Fields has said, "We are making sacrifices at every level."
But there certainly doesn’t seem to be much sign of sacrifice at home - his home, in sunny South Florida, on the water in Delray Beach.
The same Ford executive who says he’s not looking for a free ride is getting exactly that virtually every weekend in a Ford corporate jet.
For weeks, we’ve been watching as he usually slips off every Friday afternoon to Ford’s hangar at Detroit Metro Airport and then climbs aboard one of six Ford jets that whisks him to a private airport near his Palm Beach County Florida home.
Fields is usually the only passenger—plus an aircraft crew of three—but on occasion, we’ve spotted his family riding along for free, too. Well, it’s free for the Fields’ but far from free to the floundering Ford Motor Company.
The 1,100 mile, 2-and-a-half hour, one-way trip from Detroit to Boca Raton in a Gulfstream-5? It’s not cheap at $7,000 an hour but then, add in the costs of the crew and their weekend meals and lodging expenses at what is said to be a luxury Palm Beach area hotel, and then of course the costs to fly Fields back to Detroit Sunday night... can it be $70,000 a week or more?—it certainly can when the jet makes two trips to Florida, one to drop him off and another to go back and pick him up?
A Ford insider claims he’s seen paperwork that says it’s $50,000 a week but it’s unclear what’s not included in that number.
Ford refuses to confirm or deny a figure, but it certainly could be the cost of one worker’s job every week Fields flies home.
David Cole notes, "You could argue that, but you have to realize that what Mark brings is a pretty unique quality to do this." "I want to put this into context," he says. "He led a turnaround at Mazda that was truly spectacular."
Now we should make it clear, these weekly commute flights to Florida are permitted by Mark Fields’ employment contract and today Ford issued a written statement that said, in part:
"Executive compensation at Ford is designed to attract, motivate and retain key leadership talent..." But as workers are being asked to make contract concessions, why can’t top executives reaping millions simply pay for their own airline tickets?

Velocipede

Because then they'd have to ride with the Great UnWashed or perhaps even their employees! Yikes!