Come January, about 1,000 laid-off Ford workers will get their jobs back. That's because Ford, despite industry trends, is predicting that sales of its re-designed F-150 will surpass its current reduced manufacturing capacity. To prepare for this, Ford will restore a third shift at its Dearborn Truck Plant in January and invite back 1,000 workers who were previously laid off. When the wayward workers arrive back on the job, the plant's payroll will swell back up to 3,300 workers. The announcement came yesterday during a celebration at the plant to kick off production of the 2009 F-150, which was attended by Ford CEO Alan Mulally, President of the Americas Mark Fields and Ford family scion Bill Ford Jr.

Click above for high-res gallery of the 2009 Ford F-150

As is well known by now, Ford and Navistar have parted ways and the Blue Oval is developing diesel engines in-house to replace the PowerStroke lumps still being used. Slated to appear in Ford's trucks by 2011, the new oil burner code-named Scorpion is a 6.7-liter V8 with a host of innovations, some of them seemingly borrowed from cross-town rival GM.

Custom truck lovers, it doesn't matter that the whole world might seem to be against you, you will not be forgotten at this year's SEMA. Performance West will be bringing a hotted up F-150 and F-350, and now Street Scene Equipment rumbles onto the stage with it's own entrant, a juiced up 2009 F-150 Lariat.

We try to stay out of politics here at Autoblog, but sometimes, events obligate us to jump into the fray. The latest event is a Harvard Business School professor's comparison of the two leading presidential candidates to automobiles.

John Quelch said in an interview with Newsweek that he thinks of Barrack Obama as a new Prius and John McCain as an "old Ford F-150." Politically, those two products carry some weighty social symbolism that, as car guys, we're not all that concerned with.

Click on the pic above for our high-res 2009 Ford F-150 gallery