Auto industry
The VW party is over! The resistance from the workforce is laughable
The Volkswagen board is threatening to cut wages and close plants. Sounds harsh, but it is inevitable. For a long time, VW employees lived like maggots in bacon. Too long.
“Don’t mess with us, with the VW workforce!” Daniela Cavallo, head of the works council at Volkswagen, no longer warns, she threatens. “You are very close to escalation!” she growled at the VW board during a speech in Wolfsburg on Monday. The employees present reacted frenetic Applause.
Reason for Cavallo’s martial tone: VW management has announced that it will either have to cut wages or close plants. The personnel costs are also too high you have Overcapacity. VW has too many employees and machines and can produce 500,000 more vehicles in Europe than demand.
It is understandable that the workforce is now worried and will soon go to the barricades – but at the same time it is laughable and ultimately a shot in the foot. The strike culture at Volkswagen has led to sometimes absurd agreements that are no longer commercially tenable.
Breaking taboos for self-preservation
Perhaps the biggest victory of the VW labor dispute: the job guarantee. No employee has been employed since 1994 ever terminated for operational reasons, no matter how bad the company was doing. The board now wants to overturn this regulation.
It’s about time, you might think. Germany’s probably most important company is in deeper crisis than ever before. If Volkswagen wants to survive, it cannot continue like this.
However, the works council, staff and union see the end of the job guarantee as a breach of a taboo that almost empowers them to do extreme things. The problem: Anyone who works at Volkswagen has lived like a fool for decades.
VW needs to be stabbed
Above-average salaries, the prospect of big additional payments, the status of being virtually non-terminable. A VW contract is like a lottery ticket with six numbers. No wonder no one wants to give up something like this without a fight.
Fighting tooth and nail against any change may seem like an act of self-preservation. In fact, it only delays what should have happened a long time ago: the car manufacturer’s bloated personnel structures must be punctured. It seems that it can no longer be avoided that it will crash.
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Source: Stern
