Thirteen Metro Detroit plants were added Tuesday to Ford Motor Co.'s burgeoning buyout offer, as the struggling automaker works to cut capacity amid declining demand for its cars and trucks.
The buyout packages — up to $140,000 in some cases — also will be offered to blue-collar workers in four northern Ohio locations.
After failing to convince enough workers to head for the exits earlier this year, Ford began a third round of buyouts last month, extending buyout and early retirement packages to workers in Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky.
The offers are being extended to workers at assembly plants where Ford already has announced it will cut production, and the component factories that feed them.
Ford is offering the same packages it did earlier this year, when it fell short of its buyout goals. But the company has been aggressively cutting back on overtime, and hopes that the reduction in take-home pay may convince some workers to rethink their decision to stay on.
“We are changing our operating pattern at various plants to better utilize all of our people,” said Joe Hinrichs, Ford's global head of manufacturing.
Ford still has workers on hand who are not in plants but are paid to wait for new assignments in its jobs bank, known as the Job Security Program. “To have people in Job Security Program while others are working overtime doesn't make sense,” Hinrichs said Tuesday.
In June, the company began offering buyouts to workers at its Kentucky Truck Plant, Louisville Assembly Plant, Batavia Transmission Plant and Sharonville Transmission Plant, as well as its parts distribution center in Evansville.
These buyouts are voluntary, unlike the white-collar cuts under way. Ford is slashing about 15 percent of its North American salaried workforce. It has not announced a target for this, the third round of blue-collar buyouts in two years.
Workers eligible for retirement will receive a lump-sum payment of $50,000 if they agree to leave the company, plus full retirement benefits. Skilled trades workers, who are among the highest paid, will receive a $70,000 buyout payment.
The non-retirement packages include a $140,000 lump-sum payment for workers who agree to leave without any benefits other than the pensions they have accrued. Another will pay workers' college tuition for up to four years while giving them half their pay and health insurance while they work toward a degree.
The Dearborn automaker had hoped between 8,000 and 10,000 hourly employees would sign up for one of the buyout or early-retirement packages Ford began offering a month ago, but got only about 4,200 takers.
In the past three years, nearly 50,000 employees have left Ford.
