The painful day when cars stop rolling off the Ford production line has arrived but the factory workers who assembled the vehicles will not leave empty-handed.
They will be entitled to relatively generous redundancy packages, retraining and job placement schemes.
Australian Manufacturing Workers Union national vehicle division secretary Dave Smith said most workers losing their jobs on Friday were entitled to about five weeks of pay for each year of service.
Workers who remained on the production line until the final day will also get a $3700 bonus.
Mr Smith said the average length of service among the workers was about 20 years. That suggests many workers will leave the company with the equivalent of about two-years pay, taxed at a concessional rate.
Four Ford Falcons will also be up for raffle for Broadmeadows workers, while four have already been raffled in Geelong.
And unlike other industries facing long-term structural challenges, there are also a raft of state and federal schemes on offer to cushion the impact, including funding for retraining and job placement programs.
Mr Smith said the Ford employees had proven themselves to be hard workers with valuable attributes to offer prospective employers.
"They're very stable workers. Most of them have been with the company a long period of time," he said. "They're good people caught in a bad circumstance."
Premier Daniel Andrews said aside from many vehicles, the best thing Ford had produced was a "huge, skilled and diverse" group of Victorian workers.
In an opinion piece for The Age, Mr Andrews said the government was providing more than $130 million in assistance, funding programs and training for workers, businesses and communities.
"We've also established special funds for Geelong and the northern suburbs of Melbourne – the areas hit hardest by Ford's closure – focusing on job creation," he writes.
Adelaide University Professor Andrew Stewart said companies such as Ford wanted to reward the workers for long service and loyalty, particularly those who had been there for decades.
But he said the company also wanted to create a positive view of the brand and avoid compounding the misery of the workers losing their jobs.
Broadmeadows already has one of the highest jobless rates in the country. Figures from the federal Department of Employment show the unemployment rate in the suburb was 23.1 per cent in June this year. In Geelong the outlook for job seekers is brighter, with 6.2 per cent unemployment in June, down from 8.9 per cent a year earlier.
Ford currently employs about 2400 people Australia-wide. After the plant closes, that number is expected to drop to about 1600, with the loss of a net 800 positions.
Ford's redundancy provisions offer four weeks pay per year of service, capped at 90 weeks, plus an additional week for every year, uncapped.
Federal Industry Minister Greg Hunt said Ford workers would be able to access the $155 million "Growth Fund" assistance package, which focussed on helping automotive workers transition to new jobs, and on helping automotive businesses to diversity into other areas of manufacturing.
"Tomorrow will be a very sad day and that's why we're going to the world to say we can be part of these global supply chains, working with each of the firms and we've got a program to work with each of the workers to help them transition," Mr Hunt told ABC radio.