Ford Flat Rock Assembly Employees Give Back During Pandemic
Photo: Ford
Though things are opening up more and more, the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic is not over. Several Ford Flat Rock Assembly employees are helping out in the struggle against the virus, volunteering to manufacture face shields and respirators that are being used by frontline healthcare workers.
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Six salaried employees from the Flat Rock Assembly Plant are among the many Ford Motor Company employees who have volunteered to build personal protective equipment at Troy Design and Manufacturing. According to 30-year Ford employee and team manager Sophia Songer, she was spurred to action on behalf of her daughter — an intensive care nurse at the St. John Hospital in Detroit.
“We had to listen every day to what she went through,” said Songer. “This girl has a really big heart — what she went through, what she saw. They didn’t want to give up, but they were losing one after another.”
Her husband Eric also joined the cause, returning to work to help Ford put together respirators.
Though there is an inherent risk to returning to work during the ongoing pandemic, Ford has made efforts to assure workers that they’ll be entering the safest environment possible. Measures taken to ensure the safety of workers include daily temperature scans, social distancing protocols for workstations, and cleaning and sanitization standards in line with recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control.
The work has not been in vain. Dwayne Brown, a senior process coach in Flat Rock’s body department, says that he’s able to make 1,300 masks a day by himself. In all, Ford says it’s made 15 million face shields and 22,000 respirators as well as other PPE like ventilators and disposable gowns.
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Kyle S. Johnson lives in Cincinnati, a city known by many as “the Cincinnati of Southwest Ohio.” He enjoys professional wrestling, Halloween, and also other things. He has been writing for a while, and he plans to continue to write well into the future. See more articles by Kyle.