Ford not planning wider hourly buyouts, plant cuts

By David Bailey

DETROIT (Reuters) - Ford Motor Co (F.N), struggling with a U.S. sales downturn, will maintain a program of buyout offers for workers at specific plants rather than return to the kind of company-wide program that cut over 38,000 union workers from its payroll, a senior executive said on Friday.

Ford warned last week it would not meet a long-standing goal of returning to profitability in 2009 and has been preparing to fire U.S. salaried workers by August 1 because the rapid downturn in the U.S. auto industry has stalled its turnaround plan.

Ford also will need to reduce its U.S. hourly work force further due to excess capacity and will offer buyouts targeted specific plants over the next several months, said Joe Hinrichs, Ford's global head of manufacturing.

Over 38,000 U.S. hourly workers represented by the United Auto Workers union have left Ford through broad buyouts negotiated with the union, including about 4,200 after a second round of offers that concluded in early 2008, before the deeper declines in the auto market.

With some areas of Ford's business showing strength, such as cars and crossovers, broad offers are not planned, Hinrichs told reporters after a tour of an assembly plant near Detroit where Ford builds the fast-selling Focus compact car.

"We are not going to run another enterprise-wide, everybody at the same time, everyone who wants one gets one kind of thing, because there are some locations where we don't need people to leave and don't want people to leave," he said.

Hinrichs also said Ford had no plans to reopen its agreement with the UAW or any other union, or to close more plants than planned.

"Obviously, if the market changes in a dramatic fashion we have to continually evaluate what our options are, but there are no plans right now to do anything differently than what we committed to," Hinrichs said.

Ford Chief Executive Alan Mulally had said last week that a rapid deterioration in sales of large trucks and SUVs as gas prices soared above $3.50 had convinced the automaker there had been a permanent shift toward cars and crossovers.

The automaker's main goal is to balance its production to meet the changing demand.

Sales of the Focus have been up 29 percent overall through the first four months of 2008 in the United States, while industry-wide vehicle sales were down 9 percent. Ford's overall sales were down 10 percent through April.

(Editing by Andre Grenon)