Ford salaried staff strikes in England over cutbacks

The Detroit News - Ford Motor Co. salaried workers in England staged a 24-hour strike Monday to protest a proposal for pay and pension cuts for new hires.

White-collar members of Britain's Unite union began the strike Monday morning in response to the automaker's proposal to lower pay rates and close its defined-benefit pension plan to new employees.

Hourly workers have agreed to a package that includes changes to defined benefit pensions and new hire rates, the company said.

Workers went on strike at seven Ford locations in the United Kingdom: Dunton, Warley, Dagenham, Bridgend, Southampton, Daventry and Halewood. There were no reported interruptions to production as of Monday evening, said Ford spokesman Brian Bennett.

Ford, which faces a $15.4 billion gap in its global pension funding, is taking its lead from the private sector. Close to 80 percent of private firms in Britain have closed their defined-benefit pension funds to new hires, according to Bennett.

Ford believes "its existing final salary pension provisions stand comparison with the best pension arrangements in the U.K. private sector," Bennett said.

Ford's pension funds have "a significant deficit," he added.

The cuts are part of Ford's effort to close its global pension funding gap and become profitable in Europe. But they affect so few workers that they won't have much impact on the bottom line, a Ford spokesman said.

The automaker announced last month it will offer to buy out the pensions of 98,000 U.S.-based salaried retirees and former white-collar workers starting in August. Its defined-benefit pension plan has been closed to new workers since 2004.

The offer hasn't aroused the same level of anger General Motors Co. saw when it announced similar proposal for 42,000 U.S. salaried workers who retired between Oct. 1, 1997, and Dec. 1, 2011. The General Motors Retirees Association sent an irate letter last week to GM Chairman and CEO Dan Akerson in protest of the plan, which would move other retirees to an annuity program controlled by Prudential Insurance Co. of America.

Two-thirds of the Unite union, the United Kingdom's largest union that represents nearly 1,200 white-collar Ford employees, voted in May to authorize a strike if it couldn't reach an agreement with Ford.

"Ford remains willing and available to continue discussions with the union representing these workers," Bennett said."The vast majority of the company's employees are not involved in this disagreement, or the decision to take industrial action."

Representatives for the Unite union couldn't be reached Monday.