‘Gutted’ workers reeling over cuts

By John Van Klaveren
“WE’RE GUTTED.”
That was the simple but emotional response of 25-year veteran Ford worker Jim Kontogeorgis to the company’s 220 Geelong redundancies this week.
“We’re all in shock,” Mr Kontogeorgis said.
“We still can’t believe it’s happened – it’s just the magnitude of the redundancies.”
“We still have to wait two or three weeks before they come back to us with any sort of numbers.
“It was distressing to have to go home and tell the family. It affects everyone in the family.
“A lot of blokes have young families and mortgages. The older people – what are they going to do with finding work?”
“This will hit Geelong very hard and we haven’t even seen the knock-on effect yet. One job in here affects five jobs outside.”
Mr Kontogeorgis said Geelong staff thought Ford Australia was “out of the woods” with earlier federal and state funding of $103 million to ensure the company stayed in Australia until at least 2016.
“We never thought it would come to this.”
Brad Pearson, a Ford Geelong employee for 28 years, said some colleagues would start looking for other jobs immediately.
“It’s massive for Geelong. What are we going to do? ”
Australian Manufacturing Workers Union assistant state secretary Leigh Diehm said slow Falcon sales meant workers knew more redundancies were likely.
“The reality is that there was an expectation that with large car sales being down there was going to be some sort of redundancies but nowhere near this.
“We want to be aware of how they’re going to do it. We don’t want our members facing the situation we had at Toyota where they were put through an extremely bad exercise.
“We’re concerned at the lack of information. We’d have liked a much better process. ”