Volkswagen is apparently planning to cut tens of thousands of jobs in Germany. Works council boss Daniela Cavallo warned that no one could feel safe. t-online explains what exactly that means.
But what does that mean exactly? How could it come to this? And how could the crisis possibly be prevented? t-online answers the most important questions.
“The board wants to close at least three VW plants in Germany,” said group works council boss Daniela Cavallo at an information event for the workforce in Wolfsburg. According to Cavallo, in addition to the plant closures, VW is also planning to reduce capacity at all remaining locations. According to previous company information, VW is missing around 500,000 vehicles per year in order to utilize all locations to capacity.
The board is also planning redundancies for operational reasons, Cavallo continued. Entire departments are to be closed or relocated abroad. For the remaining employees, VW wants to reduce the in-house tariff by ten percent and is demanding zero rounds in 2025 and 2026. On Wednesday, the company and the IG Metall union will meet for their second round of negotiations on the VW company collective bargaining agreement.
For industry expert Jürgen Pieper, the works council’s information is exaggerated. “It sounds as if the big club is being thrown here to get concessions,” he said in an interview with t-online. He thinks it is realistic for VW to save more than 10,000 employees – but more likely by employees leaving voluntarily or being sent into retirement earlier. He believes that more than one plant is not at risk of closure anyway. “And even the probability of that happening is only 30 to 40 percent.”
So far there is only speculation about it. The factory in Osnabrück, which recently lost a hoped-for follow-up order from Porsche, is considered to be at risk.
Volkswagen took over the location after the supplier Karmann went bankrupt and manufactured niche models in small series. However, these models have largely disappeared from the range. The Transparent Factory with around 300 employees is also considered at risk, as is the factory in Chemnitz. In the former, VW builds electric cars, the other is to be converted to electric cars.
Expert Jürgen Pieper, on the other hand, suggests that the plant in Zwickau is most likely to be closed: “It is simply not being used well.” Only then would VW Osnabrück close. The work is so small that an end would only be symbolic. If the plant in Emden were to be closed, the Lower Saxony state government would stand in the way. As VW’s main plant, Wolfsburg would be too important to be closed anyway.
The last time VW closed a production site was more than 30 years ago: in 1988, VW closed its factory in Westmoreland in the USA. The Audi subsidiary recently put its plant in Brussels to the test. A VW factory has never been closed in Germany.
Like the other German car manufacturers, Volkswagen is in a deep crisis. The background is the currently low demand for electric cars. At the same time, VW is fighting increasing competition from China, whose electric cars are often significantly cheaper than those here.
“The situation at VW is serious, very serious,” car expert Ferdinand Dudenhöffer told t-online. “And now IG Metall is putting public pressure on VW by announcing that three plants will be closed. It looks more like a war than looking for a solution.”