German Manager Magazin: Works council chief sees Ford’s European business in danger002281

After the announcement of cuts plans at ford in Cologne, the company’s works council has asked the management to rethink. Should central development activities in the USA be relocated, the car segment of Ford in Europe would be threatened as a whole, said the works council chief of the Ford works, Benjamin Gruschka, on Saturday in the cathedral city. From his point of view, cars in Europe would sell worse if they were developed in the USA because customer needs are different in this country. If no more development were done in Europe, it would be “the beginning of the end overall,” warned the works council.

Recently it became known that Ford in Cologne up to Cut 3200 jobs want. The works council informed the workforce of this after the employee representatives had been informed of this at an internal committee meeting. The management does not want to comment on the project publicly. Ford has around 14,000 employees in Cologne. According to the works council, around 3,800 people are currently working in product development. In the worst case, 2,500 jobs could be cut. 700 jobs could be lost in administration.

The second largest US carmaker Ford recently had to recall vehicles again because of problems with the rear view camera. A total of around 462,000 Lincoln Explorer, Aviator and Corsair models worldwide have to be checked, as the group announced on Friday. It’s about cars from the 2020 to 2023 model years, where a defect can cause the cameras to display distorted images or fail completely.

With almost 383,000 cars, the majority of the recall campaign is on the US market. The rest is largely distributed among neighboring countries Canada and Mexico, a company spokeswoman said when asked. In Europe, no vehicles are affected by the recall. In North America, Ford had had to have repairs carried out on a large scale by authorized dealers on several other models in recent years due to defective rear-view cameras.

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