Mark Ward, a 19-year veteran Master Ford technician, is the initiator and leader of the group, having spent a year and a half researching and preparing materials for the case. He says he wants to make sure the case is "irrefutable." 

"We're tired of not being paid for what we do," he says. He is currently recruiting technicians and promoting the case on a national tour and hopes to launch the suit within 60 days. 

Ford pays dealerships and technicians a flat rate for warranty repairs. The technicians involved in the case complain that Ford's warranty repair times are not realistic and that they lead to revenue cutbacks for them. In addition to losing money, they say having strict labor procedure times can lead to rushed labor, causing safety issues and poor satisfaction results for customers. 

Ward says that one week he worked 44 hours in warranty repairs and was paid for only 33 hours of time. 

Ward, with his colleague, Joe Young, are the creators and promoters of the Web site, www.flatratetech.com, a site to educate, inform and voice issues for Ford technicians. They created the site in 2000, after watching their salaries drop year after year.

It includes an online plaintiff enrollment form for the lawsuit, as well as message forums, commentary and resource sites. The Web site gets about 3.5 million hits per month and as of late April, 12,000 technicians have signed the petition. 

"I just want to see people treated fairly," says Young, whose salary has dropped $32,000 from 1991 to 1999. After being injured in 2002, he became a full-time union organizer for Ford dealerships around the country. Young has been a Ford technician for 27 years. 

Ford has engineers and technicians that calculate what they consider a reasonable working average for warranty labor repairs. Technicians, dealers and service managers walk through the process with the engineers in order to give more voice to the technicians, says Glenn Ray, public affairs manager for Ford's customer service division. 

Kim Goering is the process development manager and is responsible for all of the service information that goes to technicians. "It's not just looking [at] and cutting labor times; it's looking at procedures and the ways of doing things," she says. 

Her division performs more than 800 labor operations and procedures per vehicle line. That is equivalent to 250,000 labor operations in the past 10 years on all vehicles. Each step in a procedure, such as installing headlights, is individually studied and times are determined and tested according to what Ford refers to as an average technician, or one that is ASE certified. 

Ford does have a "Dealer Request for Review" (DRR) process of service operations where technicians can dispute time needed to fix a certain repair. Goering's department aims to respond to these requests within 48 hours. Since January 2004, there have been 22 changes resulting in labor time increases, says Ray. In 2003, 167 DRRs were recorded; 19 operations were adjusted upward to provide more time, while the rest did not change. 

Goering says that the end goal in her job is customer satisfaction and that dealership studies are fair. "What Ford technicians are getting paid is outside of my labor time world," she says. She suggests that other factors come into play with dealerships such as possible decreases in repair orders, dealer retail rates or other dealership relationships. 

Ward says he would not encourage people to come into the dealership auto repair business because of the labor time issues and the small return on investment. "Satisfaction ? that's the only reason that keeps us here," he says. "Otherwise, we can kiss satisfaction good-bye." 

Motor Age will continue to follow this lawsuit story in the upcoming months. 

? Maren Goldberg, Associate Editor