The Valencian plant Ford You begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel. The exit is still far away, but the company’s decision to award the factory Almussafes The production of a new “multi-energy passenger vehicle” represents a relief for the workforce after years of uncertainty and lack of definition on the part of the company about what its plans were to undertake the electrification strategy. The immediate future of Ford Almussafes, therefore, has just been confirmed after the meeting at the highest level this Wednesday in the English town of Dunton.
“The main thing is resolved, which does not mean that everything is resolved,” sources from sources assessed this Thursday. UGT, majority union in the Valencian factory. The immediate thing for the Ford Almussafes workforce was to secure a new workload now that is about to stop manufacturing a single model, the Kuga, which has been and is the flagship of the plant. In fact, in Almussafes up to three models have been discontinued in recent years. Upon withdrawal of Mondeo follow the models S-Max y Galaxy.
And on April 17 say goodbye permanently to the Transit van, without Ford management having yet specified which electric models will be manufactured in Almussafes. It is not a minor issue, because the maintenance of employment is directly linked to the workload assumed by a factory whose workforce is currently at historic lows.
The 2023 ERE, which led to the departure of 1,124 people, reduced the workforce to around 4,800 workers. A figure, in any case, that is far from the 9,000 employees that has been reached in the years of greatest activity. In this sense, UGT trusts that the assignment of the new model will allow maintaining “sufficient workload” to avoid new staffing adjustments while waiting for the arrival of the long-awaited electric vehicles. Of course, no one is aware that manufacturing electric cars requires less labor.
Last year’s ERE at Ford Almussafes was already directly related to the reduction in the workload caused by the loss of the S-Max and Galaxy models. The employment regulation file was controversial not only because of the large number of departures it involved, but also because the company agreed to lower the age to benefit from early retirement. The pact reached with the unions set her at age 53, in the midst of controversy over the pension reform promoted at the time by the Government of Spain, which, however, remained silent at that time.
The one in 2023 was the second major ERE that Ford’s Valencian plant had to face, which in 2021 already laid off 630 people. The pandemic, in fact, marked a turning point in the decline of the factory of Almussafes, since since then the staff has practically lived chaining temporary employment regulation files (ERTE): if first it was the stoppage of production, then it was the supply crisis, the drop in sales in full reconversion of the business and the market …
Since then, Ford Almussafes has not raised its head. What’s more, the company’s announcement – which has been greeted with enthusiasm by the president of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, and that of the Generalitat Valenciana, Carlos Mazón -, comes in full force of the very ERTE. In this case, the forecast is that it will be extended until April 19, two days after the loss of the Transit.
Actually, Almussafes has practically avoided the closure when in 2022 it managed to prevail over the German factory in Saarlouis in the internal battle that broke out to see which would be the one that would stay with the electric models. The Valencian victory, however, soon proved insufficient. Nothing else has been known since then about the future plans or the roadmap for Almussafes. The other union, STMhas criticized that deadlines, investments or production volumes remain unspecified.