For cost reasons, 2,300 jobs are to be lost in just under three years, as the company announced in Cologne on Tuesday. In addition to the administration, the development department is badly affected, and 1,700 jobs are to be cut here. According to the works council, around 3,600 people are still working in this area – including the small research center in Aachen that was also affected. Product development, which is important for European business, will therefore shrink by about half. Staff will also be reduced in other European countries.
“These are very difficult decisions,” said Ford Germany boss Martin Sander. According to him, however, this is necessary in order to achieve a competitive cost structure and “to pave the way to a sustainably profitable future”. There must be changes, said the manager, emphasizing that Ford has good prospects. “We are ready to compete and to assert ourselves in Europe.”
The works council announced the cutback plans in January and feared at the time that as many as 3,200 jobs could be lost. Now the employee representatives were relieved that these worst fears did not come true. After intensive discussions with the management, the Ford works council announced an agreement on Tuesday, according to which redundancies at Ford in Germany are excluded until the end of 2032. “This means planning security for thousands of employees and their families,” said a statement from the employee representatives.
The general works council chairman, Benjamin Gruschka, was relieved that the worst had been prevented. “We would have liked to have secured even more jobs in our product development, because it is at the beginning of the value chain,” said the employee representative. “After all, we have now been able to secure 900 good, qualified jobs and important skills for the future of our product development, which would have been eliminated in the company’s original planning.”
Gruschka emphasized that according to the agreement, local product development “will be kept sustainable and will continue to be able to [soll]”To develop complete vehicles”. In addition, she should also take on tasks in the area of global hardware and software. “The focus will be on the European sales market, the peculiarities of which are often foreign to American developers,” said Gruschka. Ford manager Sander evaluated the agreement with the employee side as “a good basis” for “being able to jointly build a successful future for our business in Europe”.
Great Britain is also affected by the austerity plans, where 1000 jobs in product development and 300 in administration will be lost. Elsewhere in Europe, another 200 jobs will fall victim to cutbacks, totaling 3,800 jobs by the end of 2025.
Ford is in a state of upheaval, the car company swung to an electric course relatively late. This year, the first Ford electric cars manufactured in Europe are scheduled to roll off the production line in Cologne, while the combustion model Fiesta will be discontinued. Ford is investing billions in electric production in Cologne, but with the plans that have now been made public, the cathedral city is losing importance as a Ford development location.
Ford shares are temporarily up 0.61 percent in premarket NYSE trading at $13.17.
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