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Chrysler announced on Friday, October 24^th, that they were indeed going to lay-off 25% of their salaried work force as a start in a large series of planned budget cuts to keep up with the sinking stats of U.S. automotive sales. Chrysler has an estimated total of around 18,500 white-collar employees, and the budget planning will affect about 5,000 employees of that overall total. Those being released actually work for other companies and are simply under contract with Chrysler.

“We recognize that in order to strengthen our competitive capability, and reduce the time and cost to achieve our objectives, we cannot operate as we have in the past,” said Chief Executive Bob Nardelli.

“In the near future, we will be making organizational announcements as a result of restructuring actions reflecting the need to find new ways to operate.”

Automotive industry analysts also believe that due to the Chief Executive’s comments about the current budget cuts that he has also mentioned future layoffs and plant closures as the company resizes to compliment the industry sales changes.

There also have been rumors and press releases stating that Chrysler may be sold off to General Motors or even Nissan. It would certainly explain the large budget cuts, which usually happens when a company is gearing up to fall under new ownership.

Either way this turns out in the end, this is surely a disheartening clip of news as the sinking U.S. economy begins to take several more casualties. Sadly enough, Chrysler may not be the only automotive manufacturer being sold off or sinking into bankruptcy. General Motors is slowly dwindling away assets and will likely be bankrupt within a year or two if the company doesn’t slow down its spending. Auto sales in the U.S. have fallen to a considerably low percentage as consumers pocket more money to deal with the current recession.

Analysts report that the automotive sales industry is not slated to pick back up and recover until sometime in 2010.