Since VW patriarch Ferdinand Piëch and IG Metall averted the loss of tens of thousands of jobs in the 1990s with a four-day week and wage cuts, there have hardly been any deep cuts. VW rushed from one record to the next and allowed huge excess capacity to build up in the factories. When it became clear after the diesel scandal that the company had to make tough savings, the works council and the state of Lower Saxony, which has a stake in VW, slowed everything down. This is also why VW is in a situation that threatens its existence, especially the Wolfsburg parent brand with around five million cars sold per year, half of the group’s sales. The new CEO Oliver Blume, who has been in office for two years, initially relied on an alliance with the union, to restructure VW. Now the industrial peace is gone. Blume must finally fight the battles necessary to become competitive again. Nobody still wants to commit, but the calculations from previous years show the direction in which things have to go: the core brand has more than 20,000 too many employees on board. There is a quarter to a third too much capacity in the factory network. VW cannot survive like this. Blume now needs all the support he can get – especially from the Porsche and Piëch shareholder families. Their representatives, Wolfgang Porsche and Hans Michel Piëch, 81 and 82 years old, have recently been more interested in the sports car manufacturer Porsche than in the parent company VW. They too have let things slide and are partly to blame for the misery. The time has come for a generational change in the family to confirm that there is a serious desire for a new beginning.
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