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The Ford car company has just announced it would be cutting 7,000 white collar jobs globally, or 10% of its office staff. Ford CEO Jim Hackett aims to cut $600 million in costs per annum and re-deploy the savings towards ‘the cars of the future’, by which the CEO means electric and self-drive cars. Ford also has to deal with a slowdown in sales volumes. Q1 2019 earnings were only $1.1 billion, down 34% compared with the same period in 2018. In an email to workers the CEO emphasized how it would be ‘Difficult and delicate to say goodbye to work colleagues,’ especially when one is working in a family oriented group. Ford’s US white collar workers are not unionized. The UAW auto-union will not be negotiating their dismissal compensation amounts and Jim Hackett has only left those singled out to go with a few days to get their affairs in order. Other than that the message is clear and stark, the cost cutting exercise is a question of ‘reducing bureaucracy, empowering managers, speed decision making, focusing on the most valuable work and cutting costs.’ Ford will be reducing the number of organizational layers from 14 to nine by the end of the year. Democrat Senator Bernie Sanders is one of very few to criticize the move noting in a tweet that President Trump’s tax breaks resulted in $750 million in savings for Ford.
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