Chrysler and Jeep parent Stellantis offering buyouts to some U.S. salaried employees

DETROIT – Jeep and Chrysler parent company Stellantis is offering buyouts to some of its 13,000 U.S. salaried employees, as the automaker attempts to cut jobs and realign its workforce for electric vehicles and software services.

To be eligible, employees must be at least 55 years old and have been with the company for 10 years or have 30 years of service and have a pension. Employees were notified of the buyout offers Friday. They have until Dec. 5 to make a decision.

A Stellantis spokeswoman declined to say how many domestic salaried employees are eligible for the program, or whether the automaker has a target for how many workers it would like to take the packages.

“As part of our transformation to become a sustainable tech mobility company and the market leader in low-emission vehicles, in October we offered certain salaried U.S. employees the option to voluntarily separate from the company with a favorable package of benefits that otherwise would not be available to them,” she said in an emailed statement.

The automaker, which was formed by the merger of Fiat Chrysler and France-based Groupe PSA in January 2021, offered similar buyouts a year ago to pension-eligible employees. It cited similar reasons for those buyout offers.

Stellantis is at least the second Detroit automaker this year seeking to cut employee headcounts, as the companies spend billions of dollars in electric vehicles and emerging software services.

Ford Motor said in August it was cutting a total of 3,000 salaried and contract jobs, mostly in North America, as the automaker attempts to lower costs as part of restructuring efforts under CEO Jim Farley.

The country’s largest automaker, General Motors, has made such cuts in past years but not in 2022. GM Chief Financial Officer Paul Jacobson on Tuesday said the company has “no plans for any major workforce reductions.”

“We announced really kind of early in the year that we were slowing down hiring and only replacing key departures or critical needs,” Jacobson told reporters when discussing GM’s third-quarter earnings. “That was an effort to try to make sure that we’re slowing down the rate of headcount growth and making sure that we’re proactively positioning ourselves.”