Several of my coworkers who had no plans of leaving before have started applying after the layoffs announcement and one of them just gave in his notice yesterday. If their goal was to get people to quit by keeping us guessing and stuck in limbo, then it sadly seems to be working.
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Writing has been on the wall for a while. Whether skilled or slacker, it makes little difference to their plans. Most all NA salaried is being traded for cheaper foreign labor. The acceleration of that begins in earnest.
The problem I have seen is the people that leave are the ones that are highly skilled and capable. The slackers are guaranteed to stick around.
Every week in our area people are leaving for other opportunities. Ford used to be a place people wanted to work for. Were proud to work for. And that people would come for the long haul. Not anymore. Now they are hemorrhaging talent and seem clueless as to why.
There are a number of 30+ and 35+ years employees who may well choose to continue to work several more years. Talk to them now. They seem oddly unaware and view the world not much differently than it used to be 20 years ago. They are quite comfortable to stay on believing everything will happen on their own time and schedule. They appear strange relics to me.
I would imagine the OP wasn’t talking about those planning on retiring this year. Unfortunately for Ford I’ve seen some very bright people leave recently.
Overall Ford should be afraid of the mass of core engineers that are going to retire last minute. I don't think the LL departures are going to be any different. It will be like a high school dance....once all the cool kids leave, the party is over.
Managing seasoned engineers is easy. Sure there are some wild cats but for most part the job gets done. Managing new kids is a lot of work. The LLs are going to be earning their keep for sure.
In the past it seemed like there was always a Friends and Family retirement package created to benefit the LLs and the GSRs got the crumbs by default. 9 months of crumbs is good for me.
Smart move for your coworkers to look for other opportunities now, especially if they are hoping to stay local. Waiting for 6 months of severance pay is not going to pay off if a new job is going to force you to move with the current housing market.
The last day to commence your pension benefit and be locked into the lower Aug 2021 int rates for Lump Sum is Dec 1. So that would make the last day of employment November 30.
If a package happens to be offered in the meantime you can simply take the package kit. Not a big deal to cancel the initial pension process you may already have in place.
Tell them to cancel their plans.. I started my paperwork back in May and received false information from NESC related to lump sum payments. I recently cancelled it with the layoffs now pending. Now I know it is all linked to you retirement commencement date. As long as it is before Dec1 2022, you are locked into the Aug 2021 rates. It takes 5 days to process the pension choices form and it needs to be approved by NESC.
I am considering Oct31/Nov1 but there is still a lot of time to get the paperwork signed and returned to NESC. I would not take it down to the last minute especially if you have some life events in your personnel file like pending divorce , pi---d exwife , friend of the court.... Lump sum option needs spousal notary signature.
Funny thing is my management never acknowledged my retirement requests but they gave me a call when they saw I cancelled it...