John Deere Lies

John Deere claims that its workers make $70,000 a year, a number which is based on 2,200 hours a year.

The truth is that, with factory shutdowns for retooling and the like, workers are off for 3-4 months a year, or about 1600 ours, and about $40,000 a year, and Deere is assuming that they qualify for a bonus that the company has structured to be almost unobtainable:

In case you missed it, workers at Deere & Co., which owns the John Deere brand, are striking after rejecting a contract that wouldn’t give them a significant enough increase in wages. And as it turns out, the reports floating around that Deere workers make $60-70,000 per year are not accurate.

Jonah Furman, a labor journalist who has been covering the strike in detail, shared a photo of the actual wages a John Deere employee of 10 years was making: under $40,000 per year.

Long thread, but important: John Deere workers have reached out to me frustrated about media repeating company talking points that workers make 60-70k a year. One who's been there over a decade showed me what they made in 2020: Under $40k. So let’s talk about wages at John Deere. pic.twitter.com/PnFXX5VMb6

— Jonah Furman (@JonahFurman) October 15, 2021

You should read the full thread above, which explains the difference between what Deere says it pays and what it actually pays. John Deere claimed that its assembly-line workers would make about $60,000 per year and that the rejected contract would have brought those wages up to $72,000, the Washington Post reported. 

That figure misses out on one key fact, Furman contends: Most Deere plants undergo significant layoffs on a yearly basis, and those layoffs can last up to three months. Workers aren’t paid for those hours. So, to claim that a worker can make $60,000 per year isn’t wrong, but it fails to take into account the lived reality of workers. Most aren’t working the 2,200 hours per year required to make the $60,00 figure. They’re not even getting close.

And that’s still not even the full picture. Deere did hedge that the wage figures it released were based on “CIPP 120 percent.” CIPP stands for Continuous Improvement Pay Plan, which is a team-based incentive pay program that only sees workers gaining wages based on an entire department’s productivity when compared to quotas set by the company.

I'm not surprised that the WaPo was so credulous about John Deere's numbers.  Even before union hater Jeff Bezos bought them out, the Post was took the side of management in labor disputes. 

The lesson here is clear: with very few exceptions, management lies like a rug.