Noa de la Torre Valencia
Valencia
Updated Thursday, March 28, 2024-17:50
Valencia Ford awards its Almussafes factory a new vehicle that "will maintain sufficient workload"
Roadmap Ford delays production of electric cars at the Almussafes factory beyond 2026
Ford
's Valencian plant
is beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel. The exit is still far away, but the company's decision to award the
Almussafes
factory the production of a new "multi-energy passenger vehicle" is a relief for the workforce after years of uncertainty and lack of definition on the part of the company. about what their 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
UGT
, the majority union at the Valencian factory, assessed this Thursday. The immediate thing for the Ford Almussafes workforce was to secure a new workload now that
it is about to be left with the manufacturing of 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. The withdrawal of the
Mondeo
was followed by that of the
S-Max
and
Galaxy
models .
And on April 17
it will say goodbye definitively 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 maintaining 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 allocation of the new model will allow it to maintain
"sufficient workload" to avoid new staff adjustments
while awaiting 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 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 53 years old, 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
Almussafes factory, since since then the staff has practically been 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 umpteenth ERTE
. In this case, the forecast is that it will last until April 19, two days after the loss of the Transit.
In reality,
Almussafes already practically avoided closure
when in 2022 it managed to prevail over the German factory in Saarlouis in the internal fight that was unleashed 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,
STM
, has criticized that deadlines, investments or production volumes remain unspecified.