Latest on Visteon pensioners
Posted on Friday, January 29, 2010 at 10:47am
2 responses
I WENT to another meeting of the former Visteon workers in the Swansea area on Wednesday night. As you may know, Visteon was a spin-off company of Ford, and when it went bust, Ford refused to provide ex-workers with the pensions they contributed to, for up to 40 years.
When Visteon was spun out of Ford, the pensioners were led to believe that their entitlements would be the same as Ford workers. Many of them have insisted that they would only have agreed to move their pensions to Visteon’s scheme under the premise that their pensions would be protected by Ford. Many are perplexed that Ford does not appear to have lost out from the Visteon collapse. They say that it did not affect car production at all.
Many of the ex-workers angrily believe that Visteon was created to take the burden of pension pay outs off Ford, but they are unable to prove whether this is right or wrong.
A meeting between Ford and trade unionists took place last week in New York, but it is clear from the update from that meeting that Ford does not feel under obligation to pay the workers in full, regardless of whether they are contractually or morally obliged. The campaign group is now asking the union Unite to take forward legal action against Ford and, given the support from union leaders like Andy Richards at the Senedd protest last week, I would hope that Unite takes forward this legal action.
The campaign group says it has evidence to support its case that Ford has broken its contractual obligations to former Visteon workers. It will be a challenge well made, especially after we learned this week that Ford posted $2.7billion for last year. In an article for business week, Joe Phillippi, president of AutoTrends Consulting, said: “The turnaround is going exceptionally well. They’re very well positioned for significant improvements in profitability plans as production rebounds.”
I hope the plans for the legal action are successful. I intend to write to Unite to ask if it requires any assistance and to support the Visteon pensioners in their future campaigning.
