Ford’s workforce in Ohio to be part of second round of buyouts

DETROIT (AP) — The current round of early retirement and buyout offers to most of Ford Motor Co.’s U.S. hourly workers will give them options to move on with their lives, but it also will help the automaker’s bottom line, according to Ford executives.

The company won’t say how many workers it wants to leave, but it wants to empty out the much-criticized “jobs bank,” in which laid-off employees get most of their pay for not working.

Ford also wants to close the books this year on 11 former Visteon Corp. plants that it took back from its former parts-making arm, which was spun off as a separate company in 2000.

About 5,200 workers at the plants are eligible to take jobs at factories that Ford plans to keep, although Ford is offering incentives for them to stay with the new owners.

Ford plans to sell or close the plants — 10 in the U.S. and one in Mexico — by the end of the year.

The first of the current buyouts will come for workers at closed plants in Atlanta, St. Louis, Edison, N.J., and Norfolk, Va. Those offers close the week of Feb. 28 and employees would leave the company by March 1.

Ohio workers are among those at all other U.S. Ford locations who are part of Ford’s second round of buyouts, opening Monday and closing the week of March 17.

Those workers could start leaving the company April 1, with all of them gone by year’s end.

Ford has about 7,800 hourly employees in Ohio at plants in the Cleveland and Cincinnati areas.

If the company gets enough takers to clear out just under 700 workers in jobs banks and accommodate workers at the old Visteon plants, then Ford will fill openings with new workers hired at lower wages. The new workers will make about half the $28 per hour now paid to production workers.

But Joe Hinrichs, group vice president of global manufacturing, and Marty Mulloy, vice president for labor affairs, said this week in an interview that getting to the lower-tier wage scale is not the prime reason for offering the packages.

Yes, they want to improve the company’s profitability, but they also believe the packages will keep up morale as workers adjust to a new, smaller Ford that is sized to match customer demand for its cars and trucks. The buyouts come in addition to a 2006 round in which 33,600 workers left the company.

“In doing this in a voluntary and very humane way, it makes it a lot easier for our employees who are staying with us to transition to a different Ford,” said Hinrichs.

The struggling automaker is offering 10 different packages to 54,000 workers, or 93 percent of those represented by the United Auto Workers union. Packages include a $50,000 lump-sum payment for nonskilled workers near retirement and a $70,000 lump-sum payment for skilled workers. That’s a sweeter deal than in 2006, when nonskilled workers were offered a $35,000 lump sum.