The Volkswagen Group is carrying out the planned restructuring of its car factory in Zwickau: job cuts are in full swing, and new tasks are now intended to at least partially cushion the structural break. As VW announced on Wednesday at a press conference at the traditional automobile location in the northern district of Mosel, it will soon no longer just be building cars, but also dismantling old vehicles to extract raw materials. Entering the circular economy secures jobs and is strategically important, said group manager Andreas Walingen: “This will make Volkswagen more independent of global raw material trading, reduce the CO₂ footprint of the vehicles and create new business models.” Zwickau should serve as a pilot plant before the model is transferred to other locations. The initial reaction from the IG Metall union was positive. “With this investment, Volkswagen is implementing an agreement from the collective bargaining agreement in Zwickau. I welcome this starting signal as an important step towards securing jobs,” said Jan Otto, district manager of IG Metall for Berlin, Brandenburg and Saxony. Now it will be important to follow the entry into the circular economy with further extensive investments in the Zwickau plant, demanded Otto. Redundancies for operational reasons are excluded. The plant in Saxony is one of the biggest losers in the savings program that the group decided on a good year ago. Around 8,000 people currently work at VW at the Zwickau site – including temporary employees, there were at times more than 10,000. Another 500 jobs are expected to be eliminated at the factory this year, and the cuts are likely to continue after that. Redundancies for operational reasons are excluded according to the agreement with IG Metall, so VW has to organize job cuts using socially acceptable instruments such as severance pay and partial retirement. The fact that the location has too many staff is due to the weak demand for electric cars. A problem to which VW is also responding by redistributing its models to the plants in Germany. Zwickau, which was the first plant within the VW Group to switch completely to the production of electric cars, has lost the ID.4 electric city off-road vehicle to the Emden location; the Cupra Born and ID.3 compact cars are still being discussed. Last year, just over 200,000 electric cars rolled off the assembly line in Zwickau. The location’s capacity is around 300,000 vehicles. The company is now costing up to 90 million euros to start recycling combustion engines and electric cars. Saxony is contributing a further 10.7 million euros in subsidies. Dirk Panter (SPD), Saxony’s economics minister, expressed confidence on Wednesday that this would create new added value. “The diversification of the Zwickau location strengthens the future viability of this Saxon automobile region,” said the minister.VW locations in Saxony are under pressurePoliticians in the state have been trying for a long time to prevent clear-cutting at the Saxon VW locations. Almost 2,000 employees work at the VW engine plant in Chemnitz, where more than 700,000 combustion engine engines are built every year. At VW’s Transparent Factory in Dresden, automobile production with just over 200 employees ended at the end of the year. The AfD, which according to recent surveys is in the lead among voters in Saxony, is increasing the pressure by picking up on the mood among the population and sharply criticizing the shift to electromobility. Representatives of the AfD also appeared at the factory in Zwickau on Wednesday, apparently intending to take part in the event. According to reports, this was preceded by an invitation from the Saxon Ministry of Economics to members of the state parliament from all parties – but ultimately the event took place without parliamentarians.More on the subjectAccording to VW, around 500 pre-production vehicles will be dismantled in the first step this year in order to test the work. By the end of the decade, the site could then recycle up to 15,000 cars a year, it is said. This involves plastics from components or raw materials from the batteries of electric cars. By developing the circular economy, VW wants to save 200 jobs. However, the agreement with IG Metall stipulated that around 1,000 jobs with new tasks would be created. The union wants to expand Zwickau into a “central location for circular economy in the VW Group”. This covers the entire value chain, “from development to the control of the recycling processes,” said Otto.
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