Around 2,000 employees in Germany are to be affected by short-time work at the US carmaker Ford, the company’s works council told dpa in Cologne on Wednesday.
News of this measure had already become public on Tuesday evening, but the exact scope was initially unclear. Ford has around 13,000 employees at its Cologne plant.
Benjamin Gruschka, the head of the Ford works council, said short-time work will start on Monday.
Short-time work is a German government furlough scheme whereby workers are sent home by a company in financial distress, but do not lose their jobs. The government usual pays a percentage of their salary.
There will be a total of three weeks on short-time interspersed with weeks of full-time. The last week of short-time work will be followed by the two-week factory holiday over Christmas and New Year. “We are scheduled to start production again on January 6,” Gruschka said.
Ford has had a plant in Cologne for almost a hundred years, and the site has been geared up for electric cars with an investment of almost €2 billion.
In June, series production of the Ford Explorer, a compact SUV, began there. It is Ford’s first electric car for the mass market in Europe. However, customer interest has so far fallen short of expectations.
“Electric cars are not selling as well as planned at the moment – we have consumer uncertainty,” Gruschka said. He appealed to Germany’s federal politicians to boost electric mobility with subsidies.
