MAUMEE, Ohio — Each day at shift change, the bar at the Break Room Lounge fills with workers from the Ford Motor Co. plant across the street.

Early yesterday, they were there again, and sat in shoulder-to-shoulder mourning. Not just for their plant, which Ford announced it is shutting, but for the slow death of the entire American auto industry as we've known it.

At the bar, on the crowded floor and out in the parking lot, there was less a sense of shock than of inevitability.

"They've been threatening to close us for 30 years. They finally got it done," said Larry Beach, who's worked for Ford for three decades.

Just a couple of hours earlier, Ford said it is cutting more than 10,000 additional salaried jobs, offering buyouts to all of its 75,000 U.S. hourly workers and shutting down the Maumee plant in 2008 and an engine plant in Essex, Ontario, in 2007.

Ford also announced plans to sell or close by the end of 2008 all facilities that it took back as part of a bailout of Visteon Corp., a parts supplier spun off from the automaker. Those plants include a component plant in Sandusky, Ohio, that employs 1,700 workers.

The company said the changes are needed to end financial losses and remake itself into a smaller, more competitive car company. Other U.S. car companies face the same challenge as their costs rise and they lose market share to foreign automakers.

Ford said it would complete its cuts of about 30,000 hourly jobs by the end of 2008, four years ahead of its previous target. Ford also said it already had cut 4,000 salaried positions in the first quarter of this year.

In Maumee and Ford cities across the nation, many workers near retirement age said they were likely to take the buyout offer, while younger workers already were mulling plans for life after Ford.

Hank Dingus, 31, of Milford, Ohio, a millwright at Ford's Sharonville Transmission Plant in suburban Cincinnati, said he can't afford to take the buyout and lose healthcare.

"I know going back to school may not be easy, but I have to think of what's best for my family, and the auto industry doesn't offer much security anymore," he said.

Ohio Gov. Bob Taft promised affected workers the state would help with job training and other programs and try to find a new buyer for the Sandusky operation.

Ford said a plant that employs 2,000 people in St. Paul, Minn., would close in 2008 and drop from two shifts to one next year.

Todd Wiech, 46, of Howard Lake, Minn., said he's wrestling with his options.

"Myself — people that were hired in 1988 — it hits us pretty hard because we've got a lot of time invested with Ford and we're getting a little old to go out looking," said Wiech.

The Maumee stamping plant, which makes bumpers, body panels and other parts for 22 Ford plants, employs about 680 people who make $25 to $30 an hour. Robert Liley, 46, took a job there four years ago after a Ford plant he worked at in Edison, N.J., was closed.

"I've uprooted my family once and now I've got to do it again," Liley said.

Still, he hopes Ford will offer him a job elsewhere.

"I hope they do it — if there's somewhere to go," he said. "The auto industry is in trouble because people aren't buying American. That's what it boils down to."