Ford Pays a High Price for Plant Closing in Belgium GENK, Belgium - Rumors of job cuts at the big Ford plant in this scruffy former coal mining town had been circulating for months. But on a clear morning a year ago, almost nobody in Genk expected what came next. Worker representatives, summoned to a meeting room inside the factory, started tapping out text messages even before Ford executives had finished reading a terse statement. Ford had decided to shut down Genk for good. The factory, which employed 4,300 people, would produce its last car at the end of 2014. The battle of Genk had begun. And the struggle would become a case study in just how difficult it can be for an automaker to cut its manufacturing capacity in Europe, even as the car market in this part of the world is the weakest in two decades. Union stewards used megaphones to spread the grim news to workers on duty at the time of the announcement. Some people wept. Others barricaded factory gates, penning up about 6,000 newly built Mondeo cars, S-Max minivans and Galaxy vans that had already been promised to customers - creating a traffic jam that would effectively shut down production for months. The workers were not going to make things easy for Ford. "Now they had to talk," recalled Jean Vranken, regional head of the ACV union that represents Ford workers in Genk. Ford is one of the few companies to brave the fierce resistance of politicians and Europe's powerful unions as it tries to emulate the brutal downsizing that carmakers in the United States have done - and that subsequently helped make possible the rebound now under way in the American car market. But in Genk, a year after the announcement, the measure of calm that has returned has come at a high price for the company, its workers and the community. To be sure, Ford has succeeded in reaching a labor settlement that will allow it to close the factory, as scheduled, at the end of next year. The closure of Genk and two smaller factories in Britain will cut Ford's capacity in Europe by 18 percent and, the company says, make it possible to return to profitability in Europe, compared with losses this year that have already reached $1 billion. But the accord came only after a long, bitter struggle that cost Ford $750 million merely to settle with about 4,000 blue-collar workers in Genk, or about $190,000 per worker. And the total cost of Ford's European overhaul is likely to end up much higher because of additional payments to white-collar workers in Genk and the expense of closing plants in Southampton and Dagenham in England. Ford has estimated the severance costs for all three plants at $1 billion. That cost of layoffs is substantially higher than in the United States, where Ford set aside $374 million in 2009 to cover severance costs for 2,400 workers, or about $155,000 each. Moreover, European labor law is much more favorable to unions than in the United States and tends to support workers in their tradition of militancy. In Genk, workers prevented the plant from operating normally for more than four months and received unemployment benefits for some of the time they did so. By some estimates, factories in Western and Eastern Europe are capable of producing seven million or eight million more cars and light trucks than the market can absorb. Many factories are operating at only 60 percent or less. That glut is the main reason that companies including Ford, Fiat, General Motors" Opel unit and PSA Peugeot Citroën have already lost billions of euros in Europe in recent years. "Ford did not take this decision lightly," Stephen Odell, chief executive of Ford of Europe, said in a telephone interview Monday. We understand that it affects people and their families. But, he said, "we had to do it to positively influence the company going forward." Even though the auto industry has been much slower to close plants in Europe than in the United States, wary of the sort of struggle Ford has encountered, Ford is far from the only carmaker acutely aware of the excess capacity issue. llvy Njiokiktjien contributed reporting.