The American automaker Ford confirmed on Monday the cut of around 3,000 jobs, mainly in the United States, Canada and India, with the aim of reducing certain costs to accelerate its transition to electric vehicles.
This restructuring affects around 2,000 employee positions and 1,000 employee positions under contract through employment agencies, a spokesman for the manufacturer told AFP. But it does not affect the positions in the production lines.
The announcement is not a surprise: several US media had reported in July that the group, which has around 182,000 employees worldwide, was preparing to lay off several thousand of them.
“We definitely have too many people in some places, there’s no question about that,” Ford Chief Executive Jim Farley also said in a late-July conference call. “We have skills that no longer work and we have jobs that need to change,” he added, without specifying the number of positions involved.
The group had already hinted at possible redundancies when it announced a major new strategy in March, with the creation of a new entity dedicated to electric vehicles, Ford Model e.
50 billion dollars invested in electricity
Pushed by Tesla and other start-ups, Ford has stepped on the accelerator in favor of cleaner cars in recent years, with the intention of dedicating 50,000 million dollars by 2026.
But this new priority must be accompanied by a reduction in spending in the sector dedicated to traditional vehicles of up to 3,000 million dollars per year, the company’s management had indicated in March.
The cuts announced Monday “are consistent with what we have outlined for some time” and are intended to “be more efficient” across the business, the spokesperson said.
Source: BFM TV
