After weeks of tough negotiations, Volkswagen reached an agreement: 35,000 fewer jobs by 2030. The group assures that this will be done smoothly, but evil is necessary to avoid going under.
All the managers of the group's different brands had roughly the same message: it was absolutely necessary to act so as not to see the giant Volkswagen collapse under the weight of competition and the decline in the market. A European market which has actually lost around a quarter of its volumes since Covid hit, and which has never really recovered. Which leads many manufacturers to ask themselves the question of the number of factories to keep in Europe, knowing that most were already underutilized before the pandemic. The question is all the more thorny when your name is Volkswagen, when you bring together a good dozen brands and when you are faced with a wall. To avoid finding ourselves in a delicate situation, it was therefore necessary to “degrease”. But this is not the kind of speech that the group's German employees like to hear, who have gone as far as going on strike in recent weeks. After intense negotiations, the two parties still reached an agreement for a reduction in workforce… smoothly.
35,000 fewer positions
The deal is so historic that it has a name: Future Volkswagen. The group has given itself until 2030 to cut 35,000 jobs in Europe, a first for Volkswagen. With the gradual reduction in payroll alone, the group hopes to save more than a billion euros per year, reaching four billion annual savings at the peak of the plan. The employees also accepted that the 5% salary increase originally planned would not be paid as direct remuneration, but rather serves to compensate for the reduction in staff numbers and working hours. A negotiation which was probably particularly difficult for the group's leaders. Volkswagen should also drastically reduce the sometimes generous bonuses paid every year to German employees. This should therefore affect Porsche, which will not escape austerity measures.
Golf in Mexico!
On the product side, savings measures are also taken into account. The Volkswagen Golf, which has never left its land, could be produced in Mexico, where the Audi Q5 is already assembled. This should happen as early as 2027, but nothing says yet that this would coincide with the arrival of the ninth generation of Golf, since the next compact would normally be on a specific platform – SSP? The Tiguan and other larger models will remain in Germany, and the future of the Polo and the T-Cross are not even mentioned for the moment.
