Madrid –
Ford Motor Co. announced on Friday that it will cut about 1,100 jobs at its plant in the eastern Spanish city of Valencia.
The cuts are in addition to 2,300 job cuts, mostly in Germany and the UK, that the automaker announced last month as part of its “leaner and more competitive cost structure in Europe”.
In a statement, Ford Spain said it notified unions on Friday of what it described as a “substantial restructuring of its business”. Ford recently defended its Valencia plant as the preferred location for assembling its “next generation” of electric vehicles on the continent.
UGT’s union spokesman, Jose Luis Parra Navarro, said labor would be “redundant” if the factory switched to producing electric vehicles, because “less labor would be needed”. said it would be.
The plant is Ford’s only such facility in Spain and currently employs 5,400 people.
Ford Spain said in an email that the job cuts were “mainly due to the already announced termination of production of the S-Max and Galaxy models in April 2023.”
The Dearborn, Michigan-based company has a strategy to offer fully electric vehicles in Europe by 2035, with production of the first European-made electric vehicles expected to begin later this year. said.
The job cuts come amid a major shift in the global automotive industry from gas-hungry internal combustion engines to electric vehicles. Governments are pushing to reduce emissions that contribute to climate change, and as a result, the race to develop electric vehicles is causing fierce competition among automakers.
Ford announced in January that it had opened a new solar power plant at its Valencia facility, aiming to be a carbon-neutral business.
