Meet Some of the 56,500 Ford Employees Driving American Manufacturing

The Ford team has the best manufacturing talent I've witnessed in my 40-year career.

Ford employs 56,500 hourly autoworkers in America - more than anyone else¹ - and you will meet four of them in our new Ford Motor Company: From America, For America ad that airs first during the NBA Finals.

Our employees assemble more vehicles in America than other automaker.² And 80% of the vehicles we sell in America are assembled here.³

Ford avoided bankruptcy and a taxpayer-funded bailout during the Great Recession. Since then, the company has added 13,000 American jobs and increased the percentage of our global production that we assemble in the U.S. Today, more than half of all vehicles Ford sells around the world are assembled in America.

Some of our competitors have taken a different path. If others matched Ford's commitment to America, there would be as many as 15 more vehicle assembly plants across the country, assembling up to 4 million additional vehicles in the U.S. each year. And that would mean hundreds of thousands of new American jobs.

• Kelly Fricke had been a waitress for 17 years when the pandemic prompted her to seek stability and long-term opportunity. She joined Ford in 2021, inspired by her family's legacy at the company. Despite having no prior factory experience, she took a leap of faith and now finds stability, growth and a proud place in her family's multi-generational Ford history as a production floor assistant.
  
  
• Marcus Crawford is a team leader on the engine line Ford, where his father, Samuel, has worked for more than 30 years. Marcus grew up going to car shows with his father and enjoyed hearing about his work at the plant. Now Marcus is on his 13th year at Ford and he's a drag racer in his spare time. The Crawfords also enjoy working on cars together.
  
  
• Martina Pfund drives a forklift in the Material Planning & Logistics department. She is a 13-year Ford employee, carrying on a family legacy that began with her grandfather, who worked at Ford for 43 years. Martina is studying to earn her degree in supply chain management and aspires to become a process coach at Ford.
  
  
• Jeff Beuschlein, a third-generation auto worker, has dedicated his entire 37-year Ford career to the body shop, working in the same unit since he started at age 19. Over nearly four decades, he has been able to put two kids through school to provide them opportunities that he didn't have.

Our people are our most important asset. That's why we're so focused on servant leadership as part of our manufacturing transformation, now in its third year.

It's about leaders going to see our operations, learning from our employees, and serving them through problem solving. And it's about activating the minds of our people: Imagine what we can achieve with just two ideas from everybody.

Over the past 40 years of my career, I've spent nearly a year of my life on buses traveling to manufacturing plants, including last week, when I visited several Ford manufacturing plants around Michigan. These bus tours bring together employees across teams and levels. We look for excellence everywhere we go, and we have recognized more than 1,500 Ford operators in person during the last three years for their contributions.

Bus tours and kaizen exercises help create a network between our plants, leading to rapid knowledge-sharing and best-practice implementation. Take, for example, the 3D printing innovations pioneered by employees at Sharonville Transmission Plant that have inspired teams across our footprint.

That's what I call "Big Ford acting like Big Ford" - leveraging our scale to achieve world-class safety, quality and cost savings.

We are seeing meaningful improvements in safety and initial quality, and our manufacturing team has helped the company achieve three consecutive quarters of year-over-year cost improvement (when excluding the impact of tariffs). It takes every one of our industry-leading 56,500 hourly employees.

And we're just getting started.

Bryce Currie has served as Ford vice president, Americas Manufacturing, since 2023. His manufacturing career spans 40 years.

¹Based on 2024 year-end hourly employment data.

²Based on S&P Global Mobility CY 2024 US Light Vehicle Production data

³Based on S&P Global Mobility CY 2024 US Light Vehicle Production data and CY 2024 U.S. light vehicle Sales Data