German union on VW: 4-day week ‘conceivable’, will consider all options

4:42 am Thursday, September 05th, 2024

BERLIN (Reuters) -Germany’s largest trade union, which sits on Volkswagen’s supervisory board, said on Thursday it will leave no stone unturned in coming up with alternatives to the carmaker’s threats of plant closures, with a four-day week as one option.

Volkswagen said on Monday it was considering taking the unprecedented step of closing factories in Germany and ending job guarantees at six of its plants in a drive to deepen a 10 billion euro ($11 billion) cost-cutting plan.

Asked if the union would consider a four-day week as an alternative option, Christiane Benner, chair of IG Metall nationwide, said it was “conceivable”. “We will leave no idea unexplored,” she said.

Still, it was impossible to lay out detailed proposals without more information on what solutions the company was proposing, she added.

“We need forward-thinking ideas on where potential can be found,” Benner said. “VW has survived difficult situations before.”

Thorsten Groeger, head of IG Metall for the Lower Saxony region where Volkswagen is based, said agreements struck between the company and unions during previous crises were designed specifically to get the carmaker through difficult situations and should not be thrown overboard in this one.

As part of another cost-cutting drive, board member Peter Hartz agreed with unions under then CEO Ferdinand Piech and the works council to introduce a four-day week of 28.8 hours from 1994 onwards, a 20% reduction in working time with a smaller cut in pay.

Widely seen as an innovative model to save 30,000 jobs at its six German plants, the two-year agreement was adapted in subsequent years until management decided in 2006 it was hurting competitiveness and moved away from it.

Volkswagen executives said on Wednesday at a packed staff meeting in Wolfsburg that it has “maybe one, two years” to turn its main car brand around to survive electrification.

(Reporting by Victoria Waldersee, Madeline Chambers, Ilona Wissenbach, Christina Amann; editing by Matthias Williams, Miranda Murray and Jan Harvey)