Determined to cede the site to a potential buyer, the US manufacturer said Friday does not see “any Ford production opportunity” beyond 2019 for its Blanquefort plant.
Ford confirmed last Friday its willingness to withdraw completely from the production site Girondin specialized in gearboxes. In a statement issued on the sidelines of a follow-up meeting in Bordeaux attended by representatives of the state, the car manufacturer, unions and local officials, Ford France said that current projections of production volumes are “healthy” until the course of 2019 “.
After this date, “no Ford production opportunity” was identified for this plant employing 910 employees. The manufacturer’s management has also confirmed having already launched the process of creating “a team dedicated to the identification of a potential buyer” of the Blanquefort site “interested and committed to proposing a viable and sustainable solution”. It excludes any other scenario, in particular that of maintaining any Ford activity on the site.
Employee mobilization
This refusal of the “fatality of a withdrawal” of Ford and the desire to see the builder maintain were precisely the demand of the unions, who mobilized Friday a thousand protesters, Ford employees, local officials, residents of Blanquefort mixed, to through the center of Bordeaux until the scheduled meeting in the prefecture. Ford announced on February 27 that it would stop investing in its Blanquefort site, established in the Bordeaux agglomeration since 1972, after a study had shown that the production of a new gearbox there was “economically unsustainable”.
The Minister of the Economy, Bruno Le Maire, receiving March 2 in Bercy employees and elected, expressed “the total determination of the State, local elected officials, employees to maintain the activity on this beautiful site Blanquefort” . Previously, he had asked Ford to “maintain a sufficient workload (…) until the end of 2019,” to allow an optimal search for new activities for the plant, “within the Ford group or in link with external partners “.