Text: Understand the original Chedi Shang Tiantian
On September 21, according to Bloomberg, Volkswagen of Germany, which aims to reduce indirect costs by 20% within three years, began to lay off employees at its headquarters in China. Volkswagen China will reduce its workforce at the group level to the hundreds, as the company is unable to stop the continuous decline in sales in China's largest market, and Volkswagen's premium brand Audi is also laying off employees separately, according to people familiar with the matter.
In early September, Volkswagen Group issued a statement saying it was considering closing one of its car manufacturing plants and a parts plant in Germany for the first time. If implemented, the plan will be the first time in Volkswagen's history that it will close a plant in Germany.
On Sept. 10, Volkswagen terminated a more than 30-year-old job-guarantee agreement that was supposed to protect jobs until 2029 and will now end early by the middle of next year, raising the possibility of layoffs next year.
A few days ago, it was reported that the Volkswagen Group may cut as many as 30,000 jobs in Germany, of which the R&D department may be the largest layoff, and 4,000 to 6,000 of the 13,000 R&D employees in Germany will be unemployed. The Volkswagen Group's collective management committee said the 30,000 job cuts were "baseless and nonsense."
Recently, Robert Habeck, Germany's economy minister and deputy prime minister, said · the Germany government is considering how to support Volkswagen when asked about the risk of layoffs at Volkswagen, the largest automaker in the Germany.
The head of the company's labor union promised to resolutely resist the layoffs and the closure of the plant, and blamed the management for Volkswagen's problems. In a separate statement, Daniela Cavallo, Volkswagen's chief employee representative and president of the union, said: "We will fiercely resist this historic attack on our work. As long as we are here, there will be no layoffs. ”
In response to the optimization of Volkswagen Group's personnel, IG Metall, the largest local trade union in Germany, has previously protested and demanded negotiations. According to Reuters, Germany's largest trade union has pledged to spare no effort to explore options, including a four-day workweek in response to the Volkswagen Group's plans to close factories and scrap employment security agreements.
According to the financial report, in the second quarter of 2024, Volkswagen delivered 2.244 million vehicles worldwide, a year-on-year decrease of 3.8%. Volkswagen's CFO has said that due to the company's performance in the first half of this year falling short of the company's expectations, further cost cuts will be needed in the second half of the year, with the goal of saving 10 billion euros by 2026.