Since Volkswagen's shock announcement last Thursday of likely redundancies and plant closures in Germany for its flagship VW brand, trade unions and politicians have been bracing themselves for difficult negotiations. IG Metall, the majority union in the company, is rejecting factory closures and redundancies as "absolute red lines".
Following the announcement of potential redundancies and factory closures, IG Metall resurrected an idea that had already been used for 12 years at Volkswagen, between 1994 and 2006, and that is work-sharing and the introduction of a four-day week. “This could be one of the options,” said the union’s president Christiane Benner in Hanover. “We should leave no stone unturned in terms of ideas on how to preserve jobs and sites,” she added, stressing her desire not to leave employees in the...
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Article authors
Thomas Schnee
Freelance