About 2,000 employees in Germany will be affected by short-time working at American carmaker Ford, the company’s works council told dpa on Wednesday in Cologne.
The news about this measure had already become public on Tuesday evening, but the exact scope was initially unclear. Ford has approximately 13,000 employees at its Cologne plant.
Benjamin Gruschka, the head of Ford’s works council, said the reduced hours will begin Monday.
Short-time work is a German government furlough scheme in which employees are sent home by a company in financial need, but do not lose their jobs. The government usually pays a percentage of their salary.
There are a total of three weeks of short-term work, alternating with weeks of full-time work. The last week of reduced working hours is followed by the two-week factory holiday around Christmas and New Year. “The plan is to start production again on January 6,” Gruschka said.
Ford has had a factory in Cologne for almost a hundred years and the location has been prepared for electric cars with an investment of almost € 2 billion.
In June, series production of the Ford Explorer, a compact SUV, started there. It is Ford’s first mass-market electric car in Europe. However, customer interest has so far lagged behind expectations.
“Electric cars are currently not selling as well as planned – we have consumer uncertainty,” Gruschka said. He appealed to German federal politicians to stimulate electric mobility with subsidies.
