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Ford to lay off 7,000, 500 in U.S., as part of major restructuring

Layoffs hit hardest outside US

Ford Motor Co. (NYSE:F) will cut about 7,000 white-collar jobs, about 500 of them this week in the U.S., as part of a major restructuring designed to save the automaker about $600 million per year.

About 1,500 salaried U.S. employees left the company through voluntary buyouts that began last year, while 300 more have already been laid off. The latest round will be completed by day’s end on May 24.

The cuts outside the U.S. are expected to be completed by August. In all, they account for about 10 percent of Ford’s global workforce.

“To succeed in our competitive industry, and position Ford to win in a fast-changing future, we must reduce bureaucracy, empower managers, speed decision-making, focus on the most valuable work and cost cuts,” CEO Jim Hackett wrote in an internal memo that was distributed today.


Ford had signaled for months that an unspecified number of layoffs were coming, and earlier this year it announced thousands of job cuts in Europe, which included salaried workers.

Mark Solomon

Formerly the Executive Editor at DC Velocity, Mark Solomon joined FreightWaves as Managing Editor of Freight Markets. Solomon began his journalistic career in 1982 at Traffic World magazine, ran his own public relations firm (Media Based Solutions) from 1994 to 2008, and has been at DC Velocity since then. Over the course of his career, Solomon has covered nearly the whole gamut of the transportation and logistics industry, including trucking, railroads, maritime, 3PLs, and regulatory issues. Solomon witnessed and narrated the rise of Amazon and XPO Logistics and the shift of the U.S. Postal Service from a mail-focused service to parcel, as well as the exponential, e-commerce-driven growth of warehouse square footage and omnichannel fulfillment.