Ford recruits workers for the one year of production that remains
December 1, 2006
Ford Motor Co. is recruiting temporary workers to help staff the company's assembly plant in Wixom before the plant closes permanently next year.
The automaker's representatives confi rmed Thursday that the plant was taking applications for the temporary positions that would be used so the hourly employees now assigned to the Wixom plant can move into jobs at other Ford plants that will be spared in the company's sweeping restructuring.
Ford executives said in January that the Wixom plant will close permanently in 2007. The exact date for the shutdown hasn't been fixed yet but it is likely to be in the first half of the year, prior to the summer shutdown in July.
Marcey Evans, Ford spokeswoman, said the management of the Wixom plant wants to build up a bank of applications to draw on if temporary workers are needed during the transition. "The plant is preparing for its eventual idling," she said. "It's all part of the transition." Evans was careful to point out that all the applicants will have to go through a battery of tests and that there is no guarantee that applicants will be called to work in the plant.
If they are called, they will receive no benefits and none of the time they work will count toward union seniority. But they will get starting rate for new hires under Ford's current contract with the United Auto Workers, she said. The rate is about $16 an hour, according to information on the UAW contract documents.
More than 30,000 of Ford's blue-collar workers have agreed to accept early retirement under a new offer of buyouts and early retirements that expired this week.
Sean McAlinden of the Center For Automotive Studies in Ann Arbor said that even with the impending closing of plants such as Wixom, the buyouts and pending retirements will force Ford to hire hundreds of temporary workers over the next several months in order to keep plants running.
The buyouts were the latest step in Ford's restructuring, which picked up momentum in September when Ford announced it would shorten its timetable for closing plants and eliminating jobs. Ford has lost more than $7 billion during the first nine months of 2006.
The likely outcome of the restructuring is that Ford will shrink from a company that once controlled nearly 25 percent of the U.S. market to a company roughly the size of the Chrysler Group, with market share in the teens, McAlinden added.
In a filing with the Securities Exchange Commission, Ford also said that it expected to run through $17 billion in cash in the next two years as it restructures and fights to stabilize its business and market share.
Ford offered buyouts to all of its nearly 75,000 hourly workers. Employees who accepted the buyouts - any of eight different packages offered - will begin to leave the company in January 2007. The process is expected to be completed by September 2007.
Ford's new chief executive, Alan Mulally, said the buyouts will create new opportunities for the company.
"One of Ford's priorities, and a large cost component of our Way Forward plan for North America, is our ability to adjust manufacturing capacity with demand, while continuing to reduce operating costs and becoming more efficient," he said in a statement.
"While I know that in many cases decisions to leave the company were difficult for our employees, the acceptances received through this voluntary effort will help Ford to become more competitive," he said.
Mulally also praised the cooperation the company got from the United Auto Workers in putting in motion the plan for early retirements and buyouts that will allow the restructuring to proceed.
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