OUCH: Ford Plans to Lay Off at Least 1,000 Contract and Salaried Workers.

Ford Motor plans to lay off at least 1,000 salaried employees and contract workers in North America, people familiar with the matter said, the automaker’s latest effort to defray the heavy cost of investing in electric cars.

In internal meetings Monday, Ford began notifying some salaried workers in North America that job cuts would be coming, a company spokesman confirmed Tuesday morning. The planned layoffs are concentrated in the engineering ranks, where Ford is targeting costs across its business units, he said.

The automaker has made several rounds of global layoffs over the past year, including a 3,000-person reduction in the U.S. last summer and a slightly larger layoff in Europe initiated earlier this year.

Ford has about 28,000 salaried employees in North America. The U.S. automaker’s plan for another round of layoffs was first reported last week by The Wall Street Journal.

This latest reduction of Ford’s white-collar workforce includes employees in its electric-vehicle and software side of the business, the company spokesman confirmed.

Earlier today: “For all the ‘thou shalt have only electric vehicles by [insert date]’ mandating going on by state legislatures, greasy governors, and a Biden administration desperate to shove them down our throats, the numbers on the ground are signaling pretty stiff resistance.”