The management of the Volkswagen Group, working in close collaboration with the corporatist IG Metall union and its works council, is preparing a massive restructuring of production, huge job cuts and savage austerity measures at its flagship manufacturing center in Wolfsburg, Germany.
At least 30,000 jobs are at stake. Entire factory sections are to be shut down and personnel costs drastically reduced in order to triple the profit rate. For every percentage point of additional profit, savings of about one billion euros are necessary, a company spokesperson explained.
Many workers have been shocked at the enormity of the attacks underway. The World Socialist Web Site report about them has been read almost a hundred thousand times. In order to organise resistance to this, two things are important for workers to understand.
Firstly, Volkswagen’s slash-and-burn is part of an international attack on the working class. To finance the huge costs of war and trade war and to drive up share prices further, capital and governments are attacking all social gains and rights.
The auto bosses are using the shift to e-mobility to dramatically increase profits. Studies and strategy papers of the international car companies plan to cut up to 40 percent of jobs in the global auto industry. This jobs massacre is to be used to drastically reduce wages and social benefits. The individual locations will be mercilessly played off against each other, as Ford has demonstrated with the so-called “...
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