Ford Plans To Layoff 8000 Employees To Help Fund EV Investment Report

California: US carmaker Ford Motor Co is preparing to cut up to 8,000 jobs in the coming weeks in a bid to reduce costs and intensify its focus on electric vehicles, Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter. The majority of the job cuts are expected to be among Ford’s salaried ranks in the United States, as well as the Ford Blue unit created in March to run the company’s internal combustion engine operations, where the it employs about 31,000 salaried workers, the report said.Also Read – This Country To Make ‘Work From Home’ A Legal Right For Employees Soon

The cuts, whose details have not been finalized and could change, may be made in phases and are likely to begin this summer. Also Read – Meta and Alphabet Had The Highest Paid Median Employees In 2021: Report

“To deliver our Ford+ transformation and lead this exciting and disruptive new era of electric and connected vehicles, we remain focused on reshaping our work and modernizing our organization across all automotive business units and across the company,” Reuters quoted Ford spokesman T.R. Reid as saying in a statement. Also Read – Shashi Tharoor-Led Parliamentary IT Panel to Look Into BJP-Facebook ‘Links’: Reports

“As part of this, we have laid out clear targets to lower our cost structure to ensure we are lean and fully competitive with the best in the industry,” he added.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the company is expected to announce the elimination of more than 4,000 jobs in the coming weeks. The report however said that factory workers are not expected to be affected with this layoff.

Challenged by Tesla and other start-ups, traditional carmakers have accelerated production of their electric models in recent years. At the time, it said it wanted to manufacture two million electric vehicles a year by 2026 — a third of its global production — and planned to spend $50 billion on them.

The company’s executives also said they wanted to cut spending on traditional vehicles to $3 billion a year.

(With inputs from agencies)