Final Ford Rolls Off Line in Britain

LONDON AP reported that the last car rolled off the assembly line Wednesday at Ford Motor Co's flagship plant in Britain, ending 71 years of production at a factory hampered in its final days by surplus capacity and labor unrest.

Ford's long-planned closure of the Dagenham plant in east London will cost 1,100 jobs, although John Gardner, spokesman for Ford's British operations, said about 400 of these workers have found jobs elsewhere in the company.

Built in 1931, the Dagenham plant produced Fiesta cars for sale in Britain and elsewhere in Europe. The last three Fiestas built there were to be donated to charity.

Ford phased out vehicle production at Dagenham as part of its effort to cut its European plant capacity and associated costs. It now builds Fiestas in Cologne, Germany, and plans to satisfy any ``overflow'' demand for the model at a factory in Valencia, Spain, starting this May.

The end of car production at Dagenham cut the total work force there to 4,400 from 5,500. The facility is now Ford's European design and manufacturing center for diesel engines, and the number of employees there should rebound to about 5,000 as more workers are reassigned there, Gardner said.

Ford began phasing out car production at Dagenham in 2000, when it moved from two shifts to one. In its last years, the plant was running far below capacity, producing 191,000 vehicles in 1999 when it was designed to handle 278,000. Ford lost $1.13 billion that year on its European sales of $28.7 billion.

Ford of Europe's performance has improved since then. In 2001, Ford earned a profit in Europe of $266 million on sales of $31.9 billion.

Labor relations at Dagenham worsened at the same time that the plant's output levels declined. Ford's former chief executive Jac Nasser intervened personally in October 1999 after 800 Dagenham employees stopped working for a day to protest alleged racist abuses and bullying by some plant foremen.

Labor unions resisted the company's plans to stop making cars there.

Closure of the plant is unjustified, said Tony Woodley, national officer of the Transport and General Workers Union. ``If manufacturing matters to this country, which I believe it does, then the government has to put pressure on companies so it is not so easy for them to walk away from this country.''

Ford employs about 20,000 people in Britain.