Following a series of works meetings across the Volkswagen Group, the IG Metall district leader for Lower Saxony, Thorsten Gröger, said he was disappointed by the management board's statements on the savings plans at the struggling carmaker. Expectations had been "incredibly high", Gröger said on Monday after the final meeting in Hanover.
All in all, however, the assessment was now "already somewhat disappointing", he said, because employees had not been shown any clear long-term prospects beyond 2030.
"Well, you can surely expect there to be a concrete plan for how to take this company" and its many employees "into the future," Gröger continued. In his speech at the meeting, according to the prepared text, he criticised the group's communication as an "absolute disaster".
Volkswagen, like the other German carmakers, is in crisis. Group chief executive Oliver Blume has therefore announced further cost-cutting efforts and raised the prospect of a further 50,000 job cuts, half of them in Germany. In addition, the VW plants in Emden and Zwickau, as well as the Audi plant in Neckarsulm, are on the line from 2030. The Hanover site is also at risk.
Chief financial officer Arno Antlitz confirmed this at the works meeting on Monday. "Because of the large cost differences compared with other European plants, we have — from today's perspective — no economically viable follow-up allocation for four German sites when the current products run out at the beginning of the 2030s. The Hanover plant is among them," Antlitz said, according to the company.
IG Metall district leader Gröger pointed to an agreement reached with the management board in 2024. At that time, there had already been talk of possible plant closures. The traditionally strong employee representatives within the VW Group, together with the state of Lower Saxony as a shareholder, wrung a compromise out of the company's leadership in the form of a savings programme that provided for the socially responsible reduction of tens of thousands of jobs by 2030.
The board must not call into question what was agreed in 2024, Gröger went on. "You keep to contracts that have been signed." The workforce had "delivered", the union official said. "Now it is the board's turn."
Gröger gave assurances that the union would work "constructively" with management. "But if the board stays on the wrong course, then we will not shy away from conflict." In his speech he warned that if the board wanted to call the earlier agreement into question again, "then the shop floor will be ablaze at every site." "We will oppose it with all our might."
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