Ford Motor Co announced the total salary of chief executive Jim Hackett fell from $17.8 million in 2018 to $17.4 million in 2019.

Hackett's annual compensation ratio to the sum of all workers' annual compensation was 157-1, Ford said. Executive Chairman William Ford was paid a total paycheck of $16.8 million last year, up from $13 million from the previous year.

In its annual report on executive compensation, Ford presented wage and pay ratio details for its entire workforce. The report found that, in 2019, Ford workers earned a median total salary of $110,706, up from $64,316 in 2018. The drastic disparity is due to the pension rates and how the data are being measured, Ford said.

Government directives for social distancing and businesses to shut down in the face of the coronavirus pandemic have slowed demand across the car industry and sent corporations scrambling to cut costs and boil liquidity. For the first quarter, the No. 2 U.S. auto manufacturer reported a 12.5 percent decline in U.S. car sales on Thursday.

The situation at Ford is getting worse, rather than better in the current global market climate. On Friday, the automaker revealed that its previously planned April 6 restart date for North American production will not push through.

Hackett is now addressing the situation at Ford, and he said plants will not restart until May. He acknowledged that the timeline is, at best, turbid just by looking at May.

Hackett was still trying to implement a global turnaround of $11 billion when the coronavirus outbreak disrupted the automaker's operations, which closed factories across the world, suspended its dividend and had S&P Global Ratings slash its ratings to negative.

Ford scrapped plans to reopen some U.S. plants in mid-April this week and said shutdowns in Europe would continue at least until May 4.

Although Ford has announced that its executives are going to give up parts of their salaries, at this stage it is not considering wage cuts for workers. Hackett said the company is doing everything it can to keep employee pay intact in the early measures in light of the current turmoil.

The top executive still discusses but as an alternative to laying them off, the possibility of furloughing workers. Hackett said the plan is to provide three weeks of work for the staff and take an unpaid week off. "You would turn back up the pay" after the crisis has passed, he said. Hackett didn't guarantee furloughs would happen for sure, but his comment suggests Ford may go down that path.