Thread regarding Ford layoffs

Sounds like you want to find out.
Be careful what you wish for.
Personnel is the k–ler, not HR.
Hang out in the basement of the glass house.
Woooooh!

In 20 years at Ford I've seen four people get fired. They all deserved it.
Two were for very poor performance over multiple years. One of them had a habit of showing up whenever and not doing anything when he did show. The other never did anything at all for many, many years. I was amazed at how long this stuff went on without any real repercussion other than getting moved. The 3rd threatened and assaulted another employee. He was fired immediately. The last was a manager who was caught thieving over trivial things such as stealing bagels from the cafeteria. Person lost a $150K+ job over a hand full of bagels,. What a mo–n. As others have noted, during cuts it seems to be random who gets targeted at times. It all depends if you fit whatever criteria is being used.

Many years ago where I previously worked, we had a manager and a couple of engineers walked out the door for abuse of their corporate credit cards. Rumer is that they spent the money funding some sort of project instead of going through the proper processes.
When I worked in the plant back in the 90's. I witnessed a lot of UAW people walked out the door only to be brought back as part of the new local contract. In some of the instance they were given back pay.
I have never heard of anyone being fired for below average performance. It appears to me that they are moved around until they get SRD', quit or retire.

Things I have seen people get fired for

• excessive viewing of p–n during work hours after coworkers filed a complaint
• threatening to bring a weapon to work and harm others
• punching a coworker
• falsifying their resume and application - discovered after employed

Things I have never seen people get fired for

• poor performance
• poor attendance
• being under the influence of d–gs/alcohol at work.
• poor attendance

I am sure there are exceptions, but it takes a considerable amount of effort to get fired at Ford as a one off action. Staff reduction actions are a whole different ballgame. The last one seemed to keep the bad apples and eject the good apples.

It's very uncommon with FTEs. I haven't seen it happen in any group I've directly interacted with. You basically need to be caught doing something outright malicious or fraudulent, and also be stupid enough to leave a paper trail so thorough that there's no possibility of denying it. Really stupid stuff like racing in GPS-tracked test vehicles, or taking your test vehicle to the c-sino every day instead of testing anything. It needs to be a pattern of chronic, obvious fraud to even show up on the radar usually.

The bar is lower for contractors but it's still pretty uncommon to outright terminate one before the end of a contract. Doing that too often runs the risk of pissing off the contract house. It's very common to refuse to renew someone for little or no reason, though.

It can be difficult to terminate a Ford employee for cause and in my years at Ford I only saw it happen twice. One person came in late, left early and took really long lunches every day. Many times they returned from lunch smelling of alcohol and would doze at their desk in the afternoon. Needless to say they missed deadlines and meetings. They were warned multiple times, put on a plan and after months of no improvement terminated. The other had been bullying another employee relentlessly and eventually threatened the person in a meeting. Someone complained to HR and after an investigation was terminated. I’m sure HR was covering Ford’s backside because they didn’t want to be sued.

Head count reductions are a different story and those seem to be a free for all. Sometimes the ones released are trouble but frequently the people who are released leave those remaining scratching their heads. Excellent people are often released while poor performers remain. In SRD, for example, everyone was told it had nothing to do with performance and many of those released were very well respected.

Moral of the story. It’s difficult to get fired for cause but getting let go during reductions is a roll of the dice and there’s little you can do to control that.

At Ford Canada, my director was attempting to terminate the employment of an application programmer. His work was terrible and he never met a deadline. They tried for months to fire him but HR kept denying the director. Finally they got him on faked overtime claims. He'd put in for something like 60 hours of on-call overtime. They came to me to verify he had actually logged on to the MF during these 60 hours and surprise he'd NEVER signed on to any system or application. He was gone by lunch that day.

I remember co-workers who got caught either viewing p–n on company PC or caught printing p–n on company printers and only one was let go and only after he had been given multiple warnings. And the only reason HE got fired was because his co-worker (who was his new wife) went to the senior manager to complain! They soon divorced and he took up a new career as a car salesman giving up his IT job.

For non-performance it is very difficult to get fired. The performance bar is low to begin with and most supervisors prefer to either ignore non performers or pawn them off on other supervisors.
It is too much of a hassle to go thru the effort to fire a non-performer. It can take years of paperwork.

If HR gets involved for behavior issues, well then you can be walked out quite quickly. For this to happen HR has to be involved without LL5 and LL6 interference as the LL usually cover up bad behaviors and play blame the victim games.

You can get fired for several reasons. I assume you're talking about performance because I can rattle off numerous things that will get you fired almost on the spot.

Depends on their angle with performance. If they put you on a plan, it can get messy for both management and HR, which they would rather avoid. The far easier way for them to get rid of any employee is through SRD or a dump around performance review time. In fact I find it telling that they're radio silent on this whole 1400 takers going into YE performance reviews. I wouldn't be surprised if they just quietly get rid of a bunch of people (through the '20 PR) and come out saying in early '21 they hit the target or announce cuts tied to '20 performance. My guess is they do it quietly. Something seems to be in the air because I'm all of the sudden seeing a mad push to complete PR's by YE- never have seen this in my umpteen years with Ford.