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VW CEO to meet with workers as he pushes additional cuts
Oliver Blume is set to speak at the company’s headquarters in Wolfsburg on Aug. 25
Oliver Blume is scheduled to speak at the company’s headquarters in Wolfsburg on Aug. 25. (Krisztian Bocsi/Bloomberg)
Key Takeaways:
- Volkswagen CEO Oliver Blume plans worker meetings Aug. 25-26 to defend proposals for up to 50,000 more job cuts and four German plant closures.
- The restructuring could raise total job reductions to 100,000, and labor officials said leaked details triggered sharp criticism and a loss of trust.
- Blume and other executives will address employees at multiple sites after the supervisory board rejected the plan and the works council demanded answers.
Volkswagen AG CEO Oliver Blume will seek to justify his plans to cut as many as 50,000 additional jobs and possibly shutter four German plants when he holds three meetings with workers next month.
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Labor officials at Europe’s biggest carmaker have sharply criticized Blume after details of the restructuring proposals, which could double the total number of job reductions to 100,000, were leaked in the media ahead of this month’s supervisory board meeting.
The board rejected the plan and VW’s influential works council said there had been “a massive loss of trust” in management. It demanded the CEO respond directly to staff after the summer break.
Blume is scheduled to speak at the company’s headquarters in Wolfsburg on Aug. 25, and at Zwickau and Emden — two plants at risk of being shut down — the following day.
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Other board members, including VW brand chief Thomas Schäfer, will speak at six other sites. They’re under no obligation to appear but want to set out their thinking directly to employees, the works council said July 17 in a statement.
VW has been struggling to bring down carmaking costs in Germany, which are estimated to be about two-thirds higher than in other locations such as Portugal and Spain.
The showdown pits Blume, known for his close ties to VW’s billionaire Porsche-Piech clan, against the company’s 300,000-strong German workforce, its powerful labor representatives and the government of its home state of Lower Saxony.
