Trump’s trade-war tariffs seem to be hurting everybody except Trump and the countries he’s trying to bully. Most business leaders know that the United States will continue to feel the true brunt of these tariffs, in the coming months and years—something Trump is going to lie about for as long as he is in office. Companies across the board have used the big Republican corporate tax breaks to line their pockets, and many of them are “restructuring” their businesses in order to to make more with less. Less in most cases means less of a workforce. It’s being reported that Ford, the second-largest auto company in the U.S. by sales, will be looking to restructure its business to the tune of $25 billion.
CEO Jim Hackett
Ford said in a statement Friday that it is in the “early stages of reorganizing our global salaried work force,” though it declined to disclose how many people it may let go. The No. 2 U.S. auto maker by sales has about 70,000 salaried workers, and employees were told of the plan Thursday, a spokeswoman said.
The company has said that there will be a “headcount reduction over time,” which isn’t even a euphemistic way of saying it is going to fire a lot of people. Chief Financial Officer Bob Shanks told NBC News that the company has lost $1 billion due to Trump’s tariffs, and that that loss has continued to throw the company’s future plans into flux. Morgan Stanley estimates that across the world, Ford will need to reduce its “headcount,”
by about 12 percent—or 24,000 jobs. The
Wall Street Journal says it remains to be seen how many of those “headcount reductions” will be buyouts and how many will be straight-up layoffs.