Ford’s workers in India on job hunt

CHENNAI: Post Ford Motor Company’s decision to shut down its Maraimalainagar car plant, near here, many employees/workers of the US-based group in India are on the lookout for jobs.

“With Ford deciding to shut down its Maraimalainagar plant, workers may be on the look out for a job,” a Ford India Private Ltd worker said.

The workers are negotiating with Ford India for a better severance package.

Apart from the car plant, Ford also has a global technology and business centre in India.

In September 2021, Ford India announced its decision to wind down vehicle assembly in Gujarat’s Sanand by the fourth quarter of 2021, and vehicle and engine manufacturing in Chennai by the second quarter of 2022.

Ford India has four plants in the country - vehicle and engine plants in Chennai and Sanand.

The workers at the Maraimalainagar plant are also dejected at being left out, as Ford India’s Gujarat plant and its workers will be taken over by Tata Motors’ subsidiary Tata Passenger Electric Mobility.

“As per our study of job seeker activities, 62.5 per cent of the ex-employees of Ford have been actively searching for jobs in the last one week,” said Aditya Narayan Mishra,Director and CEO, CIEL HR Services, a human resources recruitment company.

About two per cent of the erstwhile Ford employees have been able to find a job in the last one year. Some of them have found employment opportunities in the automotive sector and some in the IT Services industry catering to the automotive sector, he added.

He said the data could be derived based on the changes, updates made online to the resume of the people registered with CIEL HR.

Companies like Tata Motors, MG Motors and greenfield projects like Triton have been evaluating these candidates, but the demand is not enough to absorb all the jobseekers, Mishra said.