Employees

Here at Ford, our employees are the drivers behind our successes, including our planned launch schedule of 23 new or significantly refreshed vehicles for 2014 – the most aggressive in our history. As we continue to witness surging global demand for our products, we rely ever more deeply on the skills and talents of our dedicated work force of some 181,000 individuals.

Ensuring a great place to work requires an understanding of employee satisfaction and what employees value about being part of Ford Motor Company. We engage our work force as individuals and foster leadership development in a diverse environment where people feel valued and included. We’re focused on developing a skilled and motivated team – the essence of Ford – while providing a safe, respectful and inclusive environment.

Our current manufacturing expansion is the fastest and strongest we have experienced in 50 years. To fuel this growth, we are hiring in North America and Asia Pacific and are exploring new strategies to develop a pipeline of future talent, especially in technological fields. We must keep investing in the intellectual and human capital that drives our ability to innovate and compete.

In North America, we created more than 14,000 jobs during 2012 and 2013 alone as part of our largest hiring initiative since the beginning of the new millennium. In 2013, we announced we would hire more than 3,000 salaried employees in the U.S. – 80 percent of them technical professionals to work in product development, manufacturing, quality and information technology. We expect to hire approximately 6,000 employees in Asia Pacific in 2014, the vast majority of them hourly employees.

Wherever possible, we aim to share our successes with our employees. In the U.S., for example, we paid record profit-sharing payments to about 47,000 eligible U.S. hourly employees.

Although we grew in U.S. and Asian markets, we had to realign our business in Europe to address overcapacity issues. This resulted in the closure of two U.K. plants in July of 2013. We also reached agreement to close our plant in Genk, Belgium, at the end of 2014. Meanwhile, we announced plans to exit manufacturing in Australia by October 2016. The Australia action will result in approximately 1,200 job losses. We recognize the impacts that these closures will have on the communities and we will look to maximize redeployment of those positions wherever we can. Realistically, however, we believe those opportunities will be limited.