Germany’s troubled automotive industry has cut nearly 50,000 jobs within a year. By the end of the third quarter, around 48,700 fewer people were employed in the sector compared to a year earlier, the Federal Statistical Office in Wiesbaden reported on Thursday. This represents a 6.3 percent decline, a sharper drop than in any other major industrial sector.
At the end of the quarter, the industry still employed 721,400 people. The last time the workforce was this small was at the end of the second quarter of 2011, when 718,000 people were employed in the sector.
Suppliers were hit significantly harder than manufacturers. Companies producing parts and accessories for vehicles cut about eleven percent of their jobs in the twelve months leading up to the end of September; producers of bodies, coachwork, and trailers reduced their workforce by four percent, according to the statistics office. In the area of motor vehicle and engine manufacturing, the number of employees fell by 3.8 percent.
Other large industrial sectors also saw substantial job losses. Employment in metal production and processing fell by 5.4 percent year-on-year to 215,400. The number of people working in the manufacture of data-processing equipment, electronic goods, and optical products declined by three percent to 310,300. The plastics industry shed 2.6 percent of its jobs (down to 321,400), while metal product manufacturing saw a 2.5 percent drop (to 491,500).
Mechanical engineering recorded a 2.2 percent decline, leaving 934,200 people employed at the end of the third quarter. Employment in the chemical industry fell by 1.2 percent to 323,600. Only the food industry expanded its workforce. At the end of the third quarter, it employed 8,800 more people than a year earlier, an increase of 1.8 percent to a total of 510,500.
The sectors most affected by job cuts “are suffering from three massive pressures,” said Sebastian Dullien, scientific director of the Institute for Macroeconomics and Business Cycle Research (IMK) of the Hans Böckler Foundation.
These include “the shifting geopolitical environment, which is making markets in the United States and China increasingly inaccessible for German exporters, the significantly higher energy prices triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the upcoming transition to e-mobility, with changes in supply chains and consumer uncertainty, who are currently holding back from buying motor vehicles overall.”
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