First Posted: 3/10/2015
LIMA — About 1,000 local Ford employees will be getting hundreds of dollars on Thursday, thanks to the company’s agreement with the United Auto Workers union.
The money, $6,900 to about 1,000 hourly full-time UAW-represented employees at Ford Motor Co.’s Ford Lima Engine Plant, is part of the union’s contract agreement with Ford and is profit sharing, said Stacy Allerton, Ford director of U.S. Labor Affairs.
“It really comes back to the sharing in the success of the company with all of our employees,” Allerton said. “It really helps to kind of create that sense of family and community that we have at Ford.”
The amount was determined as part of a formula that employees get about $1 for every million dollars earned by the company in North America before taxes, Allerton said.
“It’s really part of our overall strategy to have a competitive labor agreement that allows us to keep work right here in North America and in the U.S.,” she said.
The UAW Local 1219 could not be reached for comment on Monday or Tuesday.
Lima employees aren’t the only ones to receive the money, as Allerton said a little more than 50,000 U.S. employees are receiving it.
“As we look historically, it’s a sizeable payment,” she said, of the $6,900, which can be compared to one of the highest amounts in recent years: last year’s $8,800 for performance in 2013.
Over the term of the current contract, which started in 2011 and ends in September, the company has paid employees more than $30,000 in profit-sharing, more than in any other contract period, Allerton said.
Profit sharing is good business, said Jeff Sprague, CEO and president of the Allen Economic Development Group.
“It’s a great way of retaining that employee base and strengthening that employee base, which uiltimately strengthens the company,” Sprague said.
Allerton hopes employees “feel great about” the profit sharing.
“I hope that they feel that it’s a recognition of all of the hard work that they’ve put into Ford Motor Company’s recovery and to the great products and vehicles that we’ve been providing to our customers over the last four years,” she said.
