VW: The employees are not to blame for the crisis

It’s bitter. And it’s infuriating. Tens of thousands of VW employees and their families fear for their jobs. According to the VW brand board, the costs of car production in the German factories are getting out of hand. Measured by car sales. However, the board is responsible for sales, not the employees.

Yes, it’s true: the VW workforce has been doing damn well for the past 20 years. There are probably very few companies that offer higher wages and better social benefits in the assembly line production of products. That was really the program. A good 20 years ago, Volkswagen created 5,000 new jobs for people who were registered as unemployed. For a uniform monthly salary of 5,000 D-Marks. That’s how much you earned as a managing director of small and medium-sized companies back then. No problem for VW. Because car sales were booming. Man build”The car” it was soon said – perhaps a little cockily. The good income and social security of the VW employees were definitely deserved.

They may not be in the near future. The VW board is to blame for this. He misjudged the largest and most important sales market, China. In the home market, he relied on government subsidies, i.e. all of our tax money, for electric cars. Instead of “The electric car” to bring onto the market for everyone. Beetle, Golf, “E-nde”. Instead, the managers had cars built that customers hardly liked, but at least not enough. Bypassing the market. Turning point.

The employees should now pay the price for these mistakes on the part of the managers. As always in such situations, the cold side of the market economy becomes apparent. It is not yet clear how icy it will actually be. The VW works council opened up about positioning in the struggle and signaled its willingness to fight. A decent counterattack from the board and its upper management levels would be: admitting the mistakes, presenting a restructuring and investment concept for the VW brand, foregoing their own salaries, bonuses and all sorts of amenities. The shareholders should pay for a decent severance program for people who might lose their jobs at VW: by forgoing dividends.

The market economy – currently shock-frozen for VW employees – would not fundamentally become warmer as a result. But it would be a little more fair to the very tried and tested German addition “social”.