Ford is hiring 850 workers to help build aluminium F-150 pickup

Ford Motor Co., on a hiring spree in advance of next year’s labour contract negotiations, said it’s adding 850 workers at its Dearborn, Michigan, manufacturing site to help make the new aluminium-bodied F-150 pickup.

“These new jobs will help meet anticipated customer demand,” Joe Hinrichs, Ford’s president of the Americas, said in an announcement at the plant, also known as the Rouge, where Henry Ford built a sprawling industrial complex almost a century ago. “Combining salaried and hourly positions, Ford has hired more than 23,000 employees since 2011.”

The new jobs bring Ford’s hourly hiring total to more than 14,000 since 2011, exceeding a pledge it made three years ago to the United Auto Workers (UAW) union that it would recruit 12,000 by 2015. Last month, Ford said it would hire 1,200 workers at a van plant near Kansas City, which followed new job announcements at its factories in Louisville, Cleveland and Chicago.

The new hires will be dispersed among the Rouge facilities: more than 500 at the assembly plant, almost 300 at the stamping plant and more than 50 in another unit called Dearborn Diversified.

Jobs will be a focus of negotiations next year when Ford sits down with the UAW to bargain a new four-year agreement. The UAW is working to reverse a slide in membership that has seen its rolls decline to 391,415 in 2013 from a peak of 1.5 million in 1979. The hiring also helps Ford by lowering its labour costs because new recruits are paid slightly more than half the $27 an hour veteran workers make. That lower wage, first negotiated with the UAW in 2007, has been critical to Ford adding workers.

SUV boost

“Clearly, it helps our competitiveness and that’s part of the reason we’ve been so successful in our overall job growth,” Bruce Hettle, vice president of Ford’s North American manufacturing, said in a 24 September interview. “It’s good for the bottom line and good for the UAW because it’s jobs.”

Ford, boosted by record profits in North America, said in May it was likely to hire more than the 12,000 workers it promised in its 2011 contract with the UAW. Along with domestic peers General Motors Co. and Chrysler Group Llc, the auto maker has been buoyed by resurgent demand from consumers attracted by new models such as the Escape sport-utility vehicle and low financing costs amid a rebounding US economy.

The company, which is also based in Dearborn, employed 84,000 auto workers in North America at the end of last year, up from 75,000 at the end of 2011, when it reached the last four-year agreement with the UAW.

New truck

The F-150, which is scheduled to arrive in showrooms at year’s end sheds more than 318kg to improve fuel economy, mostly by using aluminium instead of steel in its body.

The auto maker has said 2014 pre-tax profit will slip to $6 billion this year, missing its goal of $7 billion to $8 billion, as recall costs rise and losses widen in South America and are higher than previously projected in Europe. Ford also is spending heavily to retool two factories for the aluminium-bodied version of its top-selling F-series trucks and investing to introduce 23 new models worldwide this year, including a redesigned version of its 50-year-old Mustang sports car.