Translated material
Ford wants to work
Trade unions intend to prevent the administration from launching the plant
Eight days after the Russian Ford assembly line was stopped due to a workers' strike, no fundamental agreements have been reached between the strikers and the plant administration. However, despite this, today Russian Ford intends to resume work in one shift using workers who are not participating in the strike. The trade unions want to interfere with the administration and are ready to continue the strike until an agreement on a salary increase is signed.Workers at the Ford plant in Vsevolozhsk began an indefinite strike on November 20 , due to which the company's management was forced to stop the plant's assembly line and restrict workers' access to the plant. The union demanded from the company management a significant increase in wages - from March 1, 2008 by 30%. According to the trade union, about a thousand people out of 2.2 thousand workers at the plant took part in the strike. Subsequently, the number of strikers was reduced to 300-400 people.
After unsuccessful negotiations, the union held a warning strike on November 7, which lasted 19 hours and was suspended by a court decision due to a violation of the strike procedure. During the warning strike, the plant did not produce 250 cars. On November 20, workers began an indefinite strike.
It must be said that this is not the first major strike this year. The plant's workforce already held a full-fledged strike from February 14 to 15. The result was the signing on February 28 of a collective agreement for a period of 1 year.
According to official company data, less than 20% of the plant's employees currently support the strike, and every day more and more workers express their readiness to start work. However, trade union leader Alexey Etmanov says he will do everything to ensure that the conveyor is not launched. “...We will hold a picket at the entrance to the plant, appealing to those people so that they do not resume production,” he said. The plant administration, for its part, says that it will not negotiate with the union until the workers resume work.
Normal operation of the conveyor involves working in three shifts, but company representatives do not say how much production volumes will decrease when working in one shift. Thus, when operating as usual, the enterprise produces 300 cars per day, that is, in seven days of downtime, more than two thousand new Ford Focus have not left the assembly line of the enterprise. The company also does not name damage from conveyor downtime.
Undoubtedly, the plant will have to somehow compensate for the shortage of cars. According to market experts, motorists will again have to pay for the downtime of the conveyor. However, Ford denies that the strike will somehow affect the cost of cars of this brand. Prices for cars will indeed increase slightly from 2008, but this will not be due to a strike, but to the plant’s transition from 2008 to the production of third-generation Focuses. New prices for these cars were published even before the strike began.
The Russian Ford plant was opened in the Vsevolozhsk district of the Leningrad region in 2002. Currently, Ford produces 300 Focus cars per day in four body styles - station wagon, sedan and five-door and three-door hatchback. By 2009, Ford plans to increase the plant's capacity to 125 thousand cars, investing $100 million in the project. At the end of last year, Ford became the best-selling foreign car in the Russian Federation, which is due to high sales volumes of Ford Focus cars in Russia.