Auto industry
The VW party is over! Employees’ resistance harms themselves
According to the works council, the Volkswagen board is threatening to close plants. Sounds harsh, but it is unavoidable. 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 with frenetic applause.
Reason for Cavallo’s martial tone: According to the works council, VW management has announced that it will have to close German plants. The personnel costs are too high and there is also excess capacity. 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. Losing the job that you actually wanted to do until you retire means a deep turning point in everyone’s biography.
At the same time, it must be noted that the strike culture at Volkswagen has led to sometimes absurd agreements that are no longer commercially tenable. And so the strikes could end up doing more harm than good to the remaining employees.
Breaking taboos for self-preservation
Perhaps the biggest victory of the VW labor dispute: the job guarantee. Since 1994, no employee has been 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, workforce and union see the end of the job guarantee as a breach of a taboo that makes them resort to the extreme means of the right to strike. The problem: Anyone who works at Volkswagen has lived like a fool for decades.
Personnel structures at VW are bloated
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 now 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.
Source: Stern
