He was a member of the board for seven years, but now the highest personnel manager of the Volkswagen Group is facing the replacement. As VW announced on Friday afternoon, Gunnar Kilian has to vacate his post with immediate effect. The personnel is delicate, because the HR manager in Wolfsburg traditionally maintains a tight wire for the IG Metall union, which has as much influence in the VW group than in any other company. Germany’s largest car manufacturer employs more than a hundred thousand people in Lower Saxony alone, global it is almost 680,000. The company is currently in the middle of a savings program that should cost thousands of positions. In a message from the Supervisory Board and an internal reporting of the works council, the group managers give the impression that there has been a significant annoyance. Kilian has obviously lost the support of the works council, which speaks in his report of “basic differences in central issues of the group”. And that include the reduction of 35,000 jobs. His name will “always be connected to the termination of our wiping family last year”, Cavallo can be quoted. Now one had to weigh up whether there was another common path: “And well -felled, we all came to the conclusion: No.” In its message, the Supervisory Board also speaks of “different ideas about the control of investment companies”. Last but not least, this is likely to affect the subsidiary Man Energy Solutions, which has long been wrestled internally and heads the supervisory board in Kilian. For a while, the manufacturer of large diesel engines and turbo machines for the Maritime industry was considered a candidate for sales. But then an agreement was concluded that the company remains part of VW. Obviously, there is now a struggle for these and other decisions. The 50 -year -old Kilian has had a very special career behind. He had started his career as a local journalist. He later worked in the office of the long-time VW patriarch Ferdinand Piëch and a few years later as the secretary of the company and managing director of the Group’s Works Council in Wolfsburg. He maintained a particularly close relationship to the former chairman of the Group’s Works Council, Bernd Osterloh. For a while, Kilian was considered its extended arm to the group board, until Osterloh himself moved from the works council to the management and took over a well-endowed item as a head of the HR on the company’s own truck holding company. Because of his diverse contacts to all important interest groups, Kilian was considered a string puller. Prime Minister Olaf Lies (SPD) sent him a correspondingly warm words. “I very much regret that Gunnar Kilian’s time is now coming to an end as the Volkswagen head of Human Resources,” said Lies on Friday afternoon. “I always enjoyed working with Gunnar Kilian both as Minister of Economics of Lower Saxony and in my first time on the Supervisory Board of Volkswagen.” Thomas Schäfer should now take the tasks of the HR board temporarily, in parallel to his task as head of Wolfsburg’s main brand VW. In the background, the reigning personnel manager of the brand, Arne Meiswinkel, should also play an important role. Parallel should start the search for a permanent successor solution, and how highly politically the topic is, the reaction of the union management around IG-Metall boss Christiane Benner. It is a practice lived at VW that the initiative for suggestions for filling the post came from IG Metall, she said on Friday. “The successor search is also a top priority for me personally.”
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