Dive Brief:
- Jim Farley, president and CEO of Ford Motor Co., earned $26.5 million in 2023, a 26% year-over-year increase, according to the company’s 2024 proxy statement Friday.
- His pay included a $1.7 million base salary, $20.3 million in stock awards, $2.4 million in non-equity incentives and $2 million in other compensation.
- Farley earned 84% of his potential annual bonuses despite missing targets for electric vehicle sales and connected services revenue growth.
Dive Insight:
The United Auto Workers union criticized executive compensation among the Detroit Three automakers before last year’s contentious labor negotiations, with UAW President Shawn Fain saying in June that it was “time to pay up.”
“Let’s be clear: this is corporate greed, plain and simple,” UAW President Shawn Fain said in a statement emailed to Automotive Dive on Friday.
Ford is reconsidering whether to continue building so many trucks at its Kentucky Truck Plant in Louisville due, in part, to higher labor costs resulting from the UAW deal, the Detroit News reported in February. The Detroit News noted that other automakers, including General Motors and Stellantis, pay lower labor costs to build some trucks in Mexico.
Fain, however, questioned whether the costs of the UAW contract were prohibitively expensive since the automaker had “no problem finding the money” to boost Farley’s compensation, according to the statement.
Ford, meanwhile, took issue with how the UAW characterized Farley’s earnings, noting that he made less in 2022 than in 2021 because the vast majority of his compensation is in company stock, a company spokesperson said in an email to Automotive Dive.
“Much of the estimated value of the [stock] grants reported in the proxy was higher because of a change in how it’s calculated – specifically as a result of our decision to link whether and the degree to which they eventually vest exclusively to total shareholder return,” the spokesperson said.
The automaker plans to cut material and manufacturing-related costs by about $2 billion in 2024 to “offset higher expenses in other areas, including for labor,” the spokesperson added.
Last month, Stellantis disclosed that Carlos Tavares, CEO and executive director of Stellantis, earned 36.5 million euros ($39.5 million) in total compensation in 2023, a 55.6% year-over-year increase.
