VW workers’ rude awakening on a closer inspection of what it means
The German metal workers’ union IG Metall leadership and the Volkswagen (VW) central works council (the legal non-union body representing the workforce) celebrated the end of the year deal, made after 70 hours of negotiations, as a success. Against the background of the VW bosses threatening plant closures and a 10% wage cut the union leaders christened the deal the “Christmas Miracle of Hanover”. For them, it was proof that social partnership works. But as the Christmas spirit evaporated, there was a rude awakening. In the end, the VW board of directors pushed through a far-reaching cuts plan, as well as massive cost savings, at the expense of the workforce with the consent of the union.
This could have looked different if IG Metall had organized a real labour dispute. But a comprehensive mobilisation of the workers failed to materialise.
Wage increase waiver remains wage waiver
Even if the basic wage rate is not reduced for the time being, an increase in the rate will be waived. The modest increase of five percent over 27 months agreed in the metal collective bargaining round is not to flow “directly into the accounts” of the workforce until 2030, instead it is to flow into the “transformation” to electric vehicles. Only from 2030 onwards will the remaining VW workers be able to look forward to getting this five percent increase in the basic wages. This waiver was proposed by the IG Metall leadership itself in the negotiations. It will not be possible to strike again for higher wage rates until 2027 – but if the IG Metall leadership follows its current logic of abandoning wage increases, the demands they propose then are likely to be more than modest, probably fearing that the corporate management would then demand further cuts.
In addition, there will be further drastic cuts by 2030, namely the elimination of collectively agreed bonus payments for two years and then a payment of a much lower amount. In recent years, these payments have been around €2,500 to €3,000 per year. In addition, holiday pay is to be abolished, and only IG Metall members will receive staggered partial wage rises from 2027. A works council has calculated that production workers on pay level 8 will suffer a loss of almost €3,800, calculated on the previous wage rates, in 2026. This alone would be €315 less per month and furthermore they will miss actually receiving the general wage rise until 2030, despite an increase urgently needed due to price increases. There is also to be a general revision of the pay rates and classifications, something which should be viewed with great caution. The question is will all this now lead to the promised saving of jobs?
Massive job cuts coming
Unfortunately, this question must be answered with a clear no. Even if the employment security agreement excludes redundancies for operational reasons until 2030, the plan of massive job cuts at VW remains! Of 120,000 VW jobs in Germany, 35,000 are to be cut, i.e. more than a quarter of the permanent workforce. This is actually higher than the previous talk of the bosses wanting 30,000 job losses. VW CEO Oliver Blume was accordingly satisfied in an interview with the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) newspaper: “We will reduce our workforce by more than 35,000 by 2030 … There was no way around the capacity adjustment. It would have been achievable by various means. The solution now agreed with a reduction in capacities at various locations corresponds to the production volume of two to three large plants. ” (FAZ website 22/12/2024)
But how exactly the “socially acceptable” job cuts will work, for example via partial retirement and severance payments, is an open question. In the past, these offers were not taken up on a voluntary basis to make it easy for the management to achieve the number of job cuts they want. Therefore, this would probably have to be accompanied by extreme pressure on workers, for example by tightening up sick return interviews and performance assessments, in order to then urge workers to accept severance payments.
At the same time, preparations are being made for the sale of the VW plant in Osnabrück. The ‘Glass Factory’ in Dresden in Saxony – named because of its glass walls that allow a view of production – is to be dismantled in its present form. A gradual death by instalments is also expected for the second VW Saxony plant in Zwickau that has about 9,000 workers, the FAZ also writes: “But the East is obviously the loser in the poker between union, management and major shareholders. The e-car factory in Zwickau, which has been converted with €1.2 billion in investments, is losing most of its work to Wolfsburg and Emden. This means a considerable surplus of personnel and weighs much more heavily than the end of production in Dresden, where the ‘Glass Factory’ has long been a niche showcase for VW. Apart from that, many agency workers and limited contract workers will gradually lose their jobs at VW. In addition, the number of training places will be significantly reduced. While there were still 1,150 possible training places available last year (less than one percent of the number of workers), there are to be only 650 per year.
Extension of working hours
It is particularly stinging that the job cuts are accompanied by an agreement on an extension of working hours by one to two hours a week for those who started at VW before 2004. In an earlier agreement, workers had received a reduction in working hours with a less than prorate loss of pay, while new staff were hired under worse conditions. Now working hours are to be “adjusted”, which means nothing other than that the preservation of existing rights will be abolished – again without full wage compensation. In total, this affects forty percent of the current permanent workforce. Instead of distributing the work to everyone, by reducing working hours with full pay, the agreement means: an increase in working hours of up to two hours per week for some and at the same time the reduction of 35,000 jobs. Other workers, on the other hand, are to get a reduction in working hours with partial wage compensation to compensate for overcapacity. These obvious contradictions are celebrated by the IG Metall leadership and the central works council as a success. Instead of a ‘Christmas miracle’, one should rather speak of a deceptive manoeuvre that has serious consequences for the workers.
Billions in savings at the expense of workers
Despite all the initial relief that many workers may have felt, a hard reality check follows: the bosses are making billions in savings on the backs of the mass of workers. According to a calculation by critical IG Metall shop stewards, these are actual losses of between 10 and 15 percent! In the above-mentioned interview, Chairman of the Board of Management Oliver Blume accordingly draws up a successful balance sheet calculation: “In the medium term, the financial statements will achieve sustainable savings of more than €15 billion per year for Volkswagen AG. Of this, more than €4 billion come annually from the fields of labour costs, structural and production measures as well as plant occupancy.” It should not be forgotten that more than €4 billion in dividends have been paid out to shareholders this year alone and VW has reserves in the hundreds of billions.
What it means for the workers at VW, entire regions and wage earners generally is summarized by the active IG Metall shop stewards Thorsten Donnermeier and Lars Hirsekorn as well as the environmental activist Tobi Roswog at the end of their position paper: “The consequences are dramatic. Thus, not only the VW workers are affected, but all of us! Throughout Germany, the automotive and supplier industry is under pressure and VW will be taken as an example to cut jobs and reach into the pockets of the rest of the workforce to satisfy the greed of the capitalists. If IG Metall does not manage to act militantly at VW with a degree of organization of over 90 percent, what kind of sign is that? We are all paying a high price for this forecast for the future.”
Social partnership or class struggle?
The IG Metall leadership has not organized a consistent labour dispute – despite an unprecedented level of organization within VW and membership of more than 90 percent. But why were there only two warning strikes lasting two and then four hours? Why was an agreement concluded without letting workers discuss it in meetings, with the option of rejecting it and instead going into industrial action from January? There was no consultation of IG Metall members on the outcome of the negotiations, although it is the workers who have to live with the consequences of this agreement.
In order to maintain control, the IG Metall bureaucracy acted with the idea: “Stop work for a few hours, go home and we’ll do the rest for you at the negotiating table.” ‘Since VW workers have only been called out for warning strikes lasting for a few hours for decades, there was little initial questioning of this approach. But there was hardly any opportunity for discussion. During the warning strikes, if a rally was held, it was on the factory premises. There were no demonstrations. The maximum threat of the IG Metall leadership – a 24-hour warning strike – was not even carried out. The declaration of war by the corporate management should have been answered with a ballot on a full strike.
Individual IG Metall functionaries made statements that a labour dispute at VW was difficult because the workers had never really fought before. Again, this is not the failure of the workers, but of the IG Metall leadership. In this situation, however, when the VW board launched such an attack, it would still have been possible to mobilise the workers and break up this ‘proxy attitude’ of leaving things to the union tops if there had been a decisive leadership that wanted to mobilise the workforce.
The pressure could have been massively increased with nationwide work stoppages. There would have been a chance to win an agreement much more in the interest of the workers, not to agree to any waiver, and to send a clear signal that any plant closure will be met with determined resistance. A central mobilizing demand would have been for sharing out the work without any loss of pay. Even if successes are only of limited duration under capitalist auspices, a consistent labour dispute with strikes, general assemblies, demonstrations, etc. could have ensured that workers get involved, become active and become a self-confident workforce. This would have had a strengthening effect for future struggles.
Militant networking within IG Metall
IG Metall needs a change of course – away from the policy of social partnership towards consistent mobilisation for strikes and even factory occupations. But this also urgently requires an organized, militant network of workers. With such a body it would be possible to systematically build up pressure from below or, if necessary, to take the initiative themselves. It is crucial to build such a structure. It will be important to learn the lessons from the current defeat without a fight and to prepare for future disputes – at VW and in other companies in the metal and electrical industry. Such a network could make a proposal on how to restructure production without the loss of jobs and how a struggle could be organised to achieve this. The “Network for Militant Trade Unions” (VKG) wants to make a contribution to this.
Fighting programme for job preservation
Struggles for job retention are certainly a much greater challenge than pure wage bargaining rounds. This is especially the case if the company already has an interest in reducing or even stopping production. In this case, work stoppages have little more effect than a means of exerting pressure. In VW Group, the company’s international organisation, however, the situation is different at the moment. A nationwide strike at all plants in Germany, including the establishment of international connections with workers abroad, would have put the Group Executive Board under pressure very quickly and massively.
If a site is to be closed, the task is to discuss in concrete terms other forms of struggle, starting with indefinite works meetings in the affected plant, blockades of gates (to prevent the removal of machines, for example) to an occupation of the plant and production under workers management. Nevertheless, in the case of a company that continues to make profits, an important building block would be that all other plants support the struggle, including strikes. The union should not participate in a mutual playing off of one plant against another. Unfortunately, in the case of the VW owned Audi factory in Brussels, it was also seen here that the IG Metall leadership expressed little interest in offering the solidarity to its brothers and sisters in Brussels, which would have been necessary.
In addition, solidarity with other workforces threatened by job cuts, such as Bosch, ZF, Ford and many others, should be urgently established. Joint strike and protest days could thus bring tens or hundreds of thousands onto the streets. In this way, a common strength could be experienced and a willingness to fight could be increased.
East Germany
But even with the agreement now signed, the plants in Dresden and Zwickau are the ones whose workforces will be the first to be thinned out and prepared for closure. This will have fatal consequences for the reputation of the IG Metall trade union in Saxony and unfortunately also favour the far right AfD and right-wing extremist forces in the companies, such as the “Zentrum Automobil” group, to capitalise on it. Socialists must not give up addressing workers here as well and offering them solidarity and an effective programme of struggle in order to show them a perspective from the left.
Co-Management
One problem is that the representatives of the largest industrial union, IG Metall, are co-management, in reality working hand-in-hand with the company bosses. This is the consequence of not being willing to think beyond the limits of the capitalist market, which is based on competition and profit. Both the chairwoman of the works council, Daniela Cavallo, and the IG Metall negotiator, Thorsten Gröger, speak in Betriebsrats-Info of a result made “under difficult economic conditions”. According to their logic, the company must be made fit for competition against others, according to the motto “if the company is doing well, then the workers are also doing well”.
But that’s not true. As long as profit maximization is the goal of production, labour costs must be reduced and jobs will be destroyed en masse under the current economic conditions and the transformation that is taking place in industry. If you don’t free yourself from this capitalist logic, you will always end up accepting the idea of job cuts and cost reductions and then selling these proposals to the workforce.
Public ownership as a basis
Only if the basis of production is changed, by transferring the corporations of the car industry into public ownership under democratic control and administration by the working population, can a socially rational and truly socially acceptable solution be brought about. This would mean that no one loses their job or has to forego wages, that working hours are reduced without loss of pay and that productivity increases benefit workers by making work easier. Through democratic and sensible planning for society as a whole, environmentally harmful production for private transport could be converted to a whole variety of socially rational and necessary goods, including a reorientation towards public transport. This discussion must be taken further, preferably within the framework of systematic networking from below in IG Metall. This can be linked to the fact that the goal of the “socialisation of key industries” is part of the IG Metall statutes.
Angelika Teweleit is a member of the federal leadership of the Sol and a member of the Spokesperson’s Council of the “Network for Militant Trade Unions” (VKG).
