DETROIT – Ford Motor is delaying its hybrid return-to-work program for workers who haven’t already returned to workplaces from October till no sooner than January because of the quickly spreading delta variant of the coronavirus.  

The automaker knowledgeable employees of its plans Wednesday morning, about 5 months after initially asserting the versatile working program for its roughly 86,000 staff globally who hadn’t returned to work but.

“The state of the COVID-19 virus stays very fluid and subsequently we’re adjusting the beginning of our hybrid work association to no sooner than January 2022,” Ford mentioned in a press release.

About 120,000 to 130,000 of Ford’s 182,000 staff, primarily in manufacturing, have already returned to work. Schedules should not anticipated to alter a lot, if any, for staff who have to be at a sure facility to carry out their duties.

Ford’s 56,000 hourly U.S. staff began returning to work in Might 2020 after Detroit’s automakers had been pressured to shutter factories for a number of weeks at first of the pandemic.

Ford additionally introduced it’s launching a brand new “brief time period distant” work association that can permit staff, who do not must work at a selected web site, to work from an alternate location throughout the nation of employment for as much as 30 days a yr.

“The versatile hybrid mannequin would be the major work association for workers whose work shouldn’t be site-dependent,” the corporate mentioned.