The Check That Resets

E2, Foundation track — Part 2 of 3

I ended the previous essay by saying that the company had no organ capable of registering what I heard on the floor. No line on the P&L. No field in the system. No metric anyone was held to.

That is a design fault, not a moral one. Design faults have solutions. This essay is about what the solution has to do.

I. The best argument against me

Start with the strongest case that none of this is true.

The frontline worker in an American auto plant has held a formal, transparent, contractual claim on the value he helps create for 4 decades. It is called profit sharing, and it is better built than most people realize.

The GM–UAW formula is mechanical and published: $1,000 for every $1 billion of North American pretax earnings, paid in increments of $250, to any employee with 1,850 or more compensated hours in the year. Ford’s works the same way. There is no discretion in it. There is no committee. A man on the line at Lansing Grand River can read the quarterly earnings release, do the arithmetic on his phone, and know what is coming before the company announces it.

So the objection writes itself. He does have a claim on value. It is auditable. He can see the number.

I want to concede this completely, because the concession is where the argument gets made.

General Motors signed a document decades ago stipulating that the men and women on its floors hold a legitimate claim on value they helped create. That principle is not in dispute. It has never been in dispute. I am not here to argue for a new principle. I am here to argue that the principle was settled in the wrong instrument.

II. 4 properties

Profit sharing fails to build wealth, and it fails for 4 structural reasons, none of which is anyone’s bad faith.

It is collective, not individual. The check is indexed to the company’s regional pretax earnings. Not to his line, his yield, his scrap rate, or the 4 points of first-pass yield he pulled out of a process last quarter. Two men on the same shift — one who transformed his station and one who did not — receive identical checks.

It is a flow, not a stock. A check, not a balance. There is no account. There is no statement. There is nothing that has a value on a Tuesday in March.

It resets annually. Nothing compounds. Nothing accumulates. Nothing transfers to a child. 40 years of participation leaves precisely the asset position of 1 year: none.

It is indexed to what he cannot touch. Tariffs. A fire at a supplier’s aluminum plant in New York. An electric-vehicle strategy decided in a room he will never enter. The formula is honest. The inputs are entirely outside his hands.

III. February, in full

Watch what those 4 properties produce across 3 years.

For 2024 performance, about 47,000 GM workers received up to $14,500 — the largest payout in the program’s history.

For 2025, announced this January, the figure was $10,500. Down 32 percent, the lowest since 2021, because North American pretax profit fell 28 percent to $10.4 billion.

Ford’s workers received up to $6,780, down from $10,208, paid March 12 — hit by roughly $2 billion in tariff costs and a supplier fire that stalled F-Series production.

Stellantis workers received nothing. For the first time since the merger formed the company, the minimum thresholds were not met. The company lost $26.3 billion.

I never received one of these checks. Profit sharing is an hourly instrument and I was salaried management, so what I can report is not what February felt like. It is what February looked like from where I stood.

I usually learned the number the way the floor did. From the papers.

Then I would walk the line and say something about it. Congratulations on the payout. The responses sorted into a small number of shapes, and after enough years I could predict which one was coming.

When the figure landed below the maximum, I heard about the goalposts. Management had set targets nobody on that line could influence — electric vehicle volume was a favorite example, and a fair one — and then paid out against them. The word that came up was dishonest.

When the maximum hit, I got a smile.

If I probed past the smile it went one of 2 ways. Either I deserve a lot more than this for what I do for you, or I’m using it to pay down my debt.

What I almost never heard was a plan. Very rarely a vacation. Very rarely a purchase somebody had been waiting on. Almost never anything that would still exist in 5 years. I am reporting an absence across many Februaries rather than counting anything, and I want that stated plainly.

Now hold those 3 responses against the 4 properties.

The goalpost complaint is the fourth property, stated by the people it lands on. They were not wrong. EV volume was decided in rooms none of them would ever enter, and their February depended on it.

I’m using it to pay down my debt is the wage arriving already spoken for, one more time, at a larger number.

And I deserve a lot more for what I do for you is the closest thing to a claim I ever heard on a factory floor in 36 years.

Notice what it is missing. It has direction and no magnitude. It is a sense of desert with no figure attached — made, every February, to the one man in the building who had the figure on his desk and never once thought to bring it down to the line.

That is the best instrument the American frontline has ever been given. Transparent, contractual, negotiated by a union at the height of its leverage. And after 40 years of it, a 55-year-old in Lansing owns exactly as much of anything as he did the day he hired in.</p