Stellantis buying out 3,500 employees to cut costs for EV production

[ironman]

From Jalopnik:

1st Gear: Stellantis Must Downsize
Electric cars are expensive to make, which is something Stellantis’ Carlos Tavares has been candid about in the past. It’s for this reason that Tavares has been beating the drum about a need to cut costs as the company prepares to launch 25 new all-electric models across its wealth of brands. To that end, the company will shed roughly 3,500 hourly jobs in the U.S. through buyouts and retirement incentives before new contract negotiations kick off with the United Auto Workers union later this year. Courtesy Automotive News:

UAW Local 1264, which represents the Stellantis stamping plant in Sterling Heights, Mich., said in a letter to members that the offers would be made “corporate wide.”

Retirement-eligible workers hired before ratification of Chrysler’s 2007 contract with the UAW can receive $50,000 to leave their job, according to the letter, which Local 1264 posted Monday on Facebook. Employees who have been with the company for at least a year would be eligible for a lump-sum benefit payment, the letter said, without specifying how much that would be.

Workers can sign up for either package from May 6 through June 19. Departure dates are tentatively scheduled for June 30 through Dec. 31, depending on each plant’s needs.

The openings would be filled by workers on indefinite layoff, the letter said.

A Stellantis spokesperson didn’t immediately comment on the plan.

The 3,500-job target would represent about 8 percent of the 43,000 hourly workers who were eligible to collect a profit-sharing check from Stellantis in March.

Of course, Stellantis is hardly alone among the Big Three in this trend. General Motors recently extended “voluntary severance packages” to salaried workers — a move that cut into its first-quarter bottom line as we learned yesterday — while Ford has shed some 3,000 white-collar jobs globally since last summer. Most recently sales for Jeep and Ram, Stellantis’ juggernauts in the U.S., slipped through the first quarter as the Detroit News reported. Jeep in particular saw a whopping 20 percent year-over-year decrease in deliveries over that period.