Ford Plans to Fire 400 U.S. Employees

[Eugene]

Ford Plans to Fire 400 U.S. Employees

By DEE-ANN DURBIN, AP Auto Writer Tue Aug 30,10:51 AM ET

DETROIT - Ford Motor Co. plans to fire 400 U.S. salaried employees by
the end of this year as part of a restructuring plan, a spokesman for
the second biggest U.S. automaker said Tuesday.

It is the first time in 30 years that Ford has forced out so many
white-collar workers, spokesman Oscar Suris said.

Ford has said it wants to reduce its North American salaried work force
by 2,750 jobs by the end of this year, but Tuesday was the first time
the company has confirmed that 400 of those employees will be fired.
Some of those dismissals already have occurred, Suris said.

<snip>

The firings were announced in an e-mail to midlevel and senior
managers from Ford president and chief operating officer Jim Padilla.
The employees will be given severance packages according to their
years of service with the company, Suris said.

More: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050830/ap_on_bi_ge/ford_job_cuts

[hadrons]

1. Barbara Ehrenreich has a new book due out called Bait and Switch ....

{subtitle: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream} about displaced White Collar workers



FROM THE PUBLISHER
Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed explored the lives of low-wage workers. Now, in Bait and Switch, she enters another hidden realm of the economy: the shadowy world of the white-collar unemployed. Armed with a plausible résumé of a professional "in transition," she attempts to land a middle-class job—undergoing career coaching and personality testing, then trawling a series of EST-like boot camps, job fairs, networking events, and evangelical job-search ministries. She gets an image makeover, works to project a winning attitude, yet is proselytized, scammed, lectured, and—again and again—rejected.

Bait and Switch highlights the people who've done everything right—gotten college degrees, developed marketable skills, and built up impressive résumés—yet have become repeatedly vulnerable to financial disaster, and not simply due to the vagaries of the business cycle. Today's ultra-lean corporations take pride in shedding their "surplus" employees—plunging them, for months or years at a stretch, into the twilight zone of white-collar unemployment, where job searching becomes a full-time job in itself. As Ehrenreich discovers, there are few social supports for these newly disposable workers—and little security even for those who have jobs.

Like the now classic Nickel and Dimed, Bait and Switch is alternately hilarious and tragic, a searing exposé of economic cruelty where we least expect it.

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=qF51snWBo2&isbn=0805076069&itm=1