These deletions will be “mainly on the Cologne site” (west), but also “on all sites in Germany”.
The American car manufacturer Ford will cut 3,200 jobs in Germany, mainly in the administrative and design fields, a spokesman for the German union IG Metall told AFP on Monday.
This announcement comes as the fear of relocation of automotive industries is mounting in Europe, since Washington introduced large subsidies for electric vehicles built in the United States, in its plan called IRA (Inflation Reduction Act).
These job cuts were revealed to the press after a general meeting of employees on Monday.
R&D affected?
They will be done “mainly on the Cologne site” (west), even if “all the sites in Germany” are threatened, detailed the spokesperson for IG Metall.
“We are extremely concerned about the future of the German development divisions and overall the future of Ford’s German sites,” the union said in a later statement.
The job cuts should concern the “product development” department of the Cologne site, where “2,500 of the 3,800 employees should leave the company”, detailed IG Metall.
A total of 15,000 people work at the Cologne site.
“The company wants to carry out the main tasks related to development in North America”, against a background of “transition from the heat engine to the electric motor”, added the union.
On its Aachen site (German city located on the Belgian and Dutch borders), where Ford has a research center, “220 employees must fear for their jobs”, according to IG Metall.
Electric race
Finally, about “20% of administrative jobs” are threatened in the country, according to the union.
Contacted, the American group was unable to comment on this information on Monday.
Ford is engaged in the race towards electric, an expensive technology which requires a complete modernization of the existing factories.
With this in mind, its European sites were already preparing for the reorganization of the group’s activities. But until recently, jobs at the Cologne site seemed to be preserved.
Last June, the company said it had chosen its Spanish factory to manufacture a future electric model, to the detriment of its factory in Saarlouis – a German city very close to the French border -, already threatening thousands of jobs.
Ford also announced this summer the cuts of several thousand jobs in the United States and India, during the conversion of factories to electric.
