MunichThe car maker Opel fight at his headquarters in Rüsselsheim with high overcapacity – in the development as in production. Because the production of the family van Zafira Tourer expires in the summer, the situation threatens to worsen.
Because then rolls only in Hesse OpelFlagship Insignia off the line. Rüsselsheim urgently needs a second model in order to be able to utilize its more than 3000 employees in production with work.
Now it is clear which vehicle should be manufactured next to the Insignia on the Opel seat. The so-called “Site Selection Process” for the Astra, ie the location search for the new compact car, has largely been completed, according to information from the Handelsblatt.
Thus, there are only two scenarios: Variant one states that the successor to the Astra as before with a volume of 75 percent in the English Ellesmere Port is built and the remaining volume instead of how currently in the Polish Gliwice in Rüsselsheim is made.
Because of the Brexit and the currently existing high currency risks, however, variant two is considered much more realistic. According to this, three-quarters of the volume of the new Astra will be awarded to the Rüsselsheim site and only the right-hand drive for the British market will be rolled off the production line in Ellesmere Port.
Already in the coming week a final decision is to fall to it, is called it in group circles.
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So it is clear: Opel brings the Astra back to Rüsselsheim. The model was produced before 2015 in Hesse. From the end of 2021, the future generation of the compact car will once again bear the seal “Made in Germany”. About the plans had first reported “Echo Online”,
In the Rüsselsheim plant, the jubilation on the news of the return of the Astra is certainly limited. Because the price for the supplement of the compact car is high. In return, the production capacity of the factory is expected to shrink by a third, according to group sources.
Union announces resistance
While today it is possible to produce up to 60 vehicles per hour in Rüsselsheim, in future it will only be 40 cars per hour. The shop stewards IG metal have internally already announced resistance to the plans of the management of Opel boss Michael Lohscheller.
“We do not accept this shrinkage strategy for Rüsselsheim’s parent plant,” says a resolution of the shop stewards. The workers’ representatives demand that all investment pledges be “unconditional” and accuse the management of breaking the collective bargaining agreement.
“Shrinking the work does not do justice to the spirit and content of the collective agreement,” the two-page resolution says. In addition, the Opel management of the workforce apparently demand concessions on working hours and pay, two insiders confirm independently.
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Opel himself is not very specific: “Please understand that we do not comment on speculation. Basically, we want to further improve the competitiveness and capacity utilization of our plants, and of course this also applies to Rüsselsheim. “
However, the start of the new Astra will only start at the end of 2021. Until then, the Rüsselsheim vehicle factory is foreseeably faced with a significant underutilization. As the Handelsblatt reported at the end of last year, Opel is therefore considering among other things, short-time working in his parent plant,
A possible staff reduction want the IG metal Trust people on the other hand “do not accept”. The trade unionists are obviously worried that the French Opel parent company PSA (Peugeot, Citroën) could press for a part of the core workforce in the German subsidiaries successively replaced by temporary workers.
The production philosophy of PSA envisages a “massive expansion of temporary employment,” according to the resolution of the confidants. In the French PSA works, the share of temporary work is sometimes more than 50 percent, write the unionists: “People are often stopped for half a year, squeezed out and how they are physically dismissed in the end”.
From the point of view of the IG Metall this strategy is in high wage countries like Germany “Counterproductive”. The employee representatives are against the systematic use of temporary workers or “temporary exploitation”.
High labor costs in Germany
One thing is for sure: Although Opel has already reduced its workforce by thousands since its takeover by PSA in the summer of 2017 and is making profits for the first time in 20 years, the brand’s costs for lightning are still too high to compete in the medium and long term Carmaker to be able to exist.
“The German locations are economically particularly weak and have the greatest risk of danger,” states Ferdinand Dudenhöffer, director of the Center of Automotive Research (CAR). His institute has modeled how the individual Opel locations compare in terms of labor costs in the individual countries in the competitive comparison.
The conclusion: According to CAR calculations, average labor costs in Germany for a mid-range vehicle are .150 euros, while in Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Portugal identical plants can save up to 70 percent of their labor costs. PSA maintains factories in all these countries.
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If one excludes the supply parts, the staff is usually responsible for more than 40 of the total costs in a vehicle production. In the internal PSA comparison, the domestic Opel plants in Rüsselsheim, Kaiserslautern and Eisenach lag behind. PSA boss Carlos Tavares wants to change that and trim Opel further on efficiency.
The Astra is after the Corsa the best-selling model of Opel. Last year, the Group sold around 182,000 units of the model. However, the classic compact car segment is under pressure from the SUV boom. In Ellesmere Port, therefore, only about 76,500 Astra were produced in 2018.
Even if this volume were transferred one-to-one to the location in Rüsselsheim, the factory in Hessen could by no means be completely exhausted. However, the headquarters in Hesse will at least have a perspective with the new Astra generation in two years, albeit one that is likely to be associated with shrinkage.
Worse, it probably hits the British site in Ellesmere Port. All Astra variants, in which the steering wheel is fastened on the left for the market on the European mainland, probably move to Hesse. In the production near Liverpool remain the current plans probably only those variants with the steering wheel on the right side, which are sold in the UK and South Africa. The result should be further cuts.
In Ellesmere Port only 320 jobs were deleted last year, this year another 240 jobs are dropped. The company’s workforce will shrink to barely more than 900 by the end of the year.
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