By DCB Editorial, July 14, 2025
What we are witnessing at Ford’s Cologne plant is yet another chapter of a global corporation offloading the costs of its own strategic miscalculations and the broader structural crisis of the auto industry onto its workers.
Ford, facing the slow uptake of electric vehicles (a market trend shaped by inadequate public infrastructure and policy indecision), has secured a so-called “job protection plan” for over 10,000 workers, but this is a protection in name more than substance. Buried within the plan are 2,900 job cuts, first announced last year, now sugarcoated with promises of “voluntary” layoffs and internal swaps. This, of course, is a classic maneuver: the illusion of choice in the context of limited power.
The Cologne plant, once a symbol of industrial strength in Germany, has now become a cautionary tale of what happens when profit-driven restructuring overrides democratic planning and worker-centered priorities. Ford poured $2 billion into converting the facility into an EV hub, and yet the benefits of that investment have not accrued to the workers but to Ford executives and shareholders. Production of the Explorer and Capri EVs continues, but the actual future of stable, well-paying work at the plant remains “unclear”, even according to IG Metall.
Meanwhile, Ford has the audacity to call on the German state to support its electrification efforts, seeking subsidies, incentives, and public infrastructure for a transition it otherwise wants to privatise the gains of and socialise the risks for. This is not a partnership with labour or society; it’s corporate extraction disguised as green innovation.
The closure of the Saarlouis plant and the uncertainty in Cologne are not anomalies. They reflect a system in which workers are perpetually asked to “adapt” to market shifts, while corporations maintain the right to move, cut, and reallocate capital without democratic input. That this deal still requires a workers’ vote shows a sliver of worker agency.