Ford has announced that it will halve output of Transit vans at its Southampton, UK plant.
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Ford said it was planning to continue making the Transit panel van at the Southampton plant until 2011. After that it wants to use the site to only make a specialist version of the model called “a chassis cab vehicle”.
The plant currently produces 75,000 Transit vans a year but this will be steadily reduced to 35,000 a year.
The move follows the termination of 124 short-term contracts at the plant last month.
British labour union Unite has met with senior executives from Ford Europe today to discuss future investments into Ford’s Southampton plant, where the Ford Transit van is made.
Unite says that Ford has proposed implementing a ‘chassis cab’ operation at the site. Unite has made clear its opposition to these proposals, as the union believes these plans would lead to the closure of Southampton in the long-term, as well as having major implications for other UK plants.
In recent years Ford has invested more in its Turkish LCV operations where the Transit Connect and Transit vans are both made.
In a statement released this afternoon, Brian Bennet, the corporate affairs manager of Ford UK, said: “Ford’s Southampton plant operates within a competitive European commercial vehicle market. As usual at this stage in a vehicle’s lifecycle, Ford has been discussing with employee representatives and union officials plans for future model investment at the plant.”
Unite national officer, Dave Osborne, said in a statmement:
“Unless Southampton and the future of other Ford UK plants are secured, there will be no recommendation for settlement in the forthcoming pay negotiations. Securing investment and the future of our members’ jobs is of paramount importance for Unite. Failure to agree such security will create a major stumbling block.
“Ford’s proposals are a direct contradiction to the guarantees they have made to the UK and to the practice of locating where they sell. Southampton needs approximately $200m for its future to be secure. Yet the equivalent of well over half of this money has been given to seven of Ford’s top executives in the last two years. It is unacceptable that the future of hundreds of Ford workers in the UK is put at risk because of excessive corporate greed.”
