Volkswagen workers boo CEO Blume as German job-cut plan hangs over plants

Volkswagen chief executive Oliver Blume was booed and whistled at the company’s Wolfsburg headquarters this week as he told thousands of workers that a deep reorganisation, including job cuts, is required if the carmaker is to hold its ground against Chinese rivals and US tariffs. Witnesses said half of the cuts now discussed, a figure often put near 50,000, would fall in Germany and the other half across some 170 companies in the group abroad. Blume said management wanted voluntary exits, phased retirement, mutual agreements, natural attrition and a freeze on hiring where it could. Factory closures, he said, were “the last and most costly resort.”

The reception in the hall, and on the overflow stream outside, showed how little credit that phrasing now buys. In June, Manager Magazin and people familiar with internal discussions described a plan that could take the German job cuts well beyond the 50,000 already tabled for 2030 and could idle four plants: Emden, Zwickau, Hanover and Audi’s Neckarsulm. Closing those four sites alone would put more than 45,000 jobs in question. Combined with the existing programme, some accounts put the potential total near 100,000 worldwide, close to one in six of a workforce of about 625,000. That would be larger than General Motors’ 1990s cull of about 74,000 jobs.

Blume told the Wolfsburg meeting that the company wants a future for every factory. Among the options he has floated are building electric models now sold in China but not yet in Europe, and shifting some lines toward defence work. Production at Osnabrück is already scheduled to end, possibly next year. The group has talked to buyers for that site, including, in earlier reporting, a defence manufacturer.

Why the cuts keep getting larger

Volkswagen spent years as Europe’s volume leader with a cost base set in Germany. Chinese makers now sell electric cars in Europe at prices Wolfsburg struggles to match. US tariffs have hit exports. European demand has been flat or down. A company spokesman said in June that tariffs, competition and “stagnating, sometimes declining” markets can create “burdens on the company reaching tens of billions of euros per year.” Blume had already promised about €11 billion in cost reduction.

The 2024 attempt to force a first wave of cuts ran into IG Metall and the works council. Lower Saxony, the group’s second-largest shareholder, lined up with the unions. The June plan to name four plants for closure was always going to meet the same wall. This week’s meeting was Blume trying to sell the necessity without naming the padlocks. Workers heard the necessity. They also heard that half the jobs under discussion are German.

Wolfsburg itself is not on the June closure list. It is still the largest single car plant in the world, with some 70,000 people on a site of 6.5 million square metres. Golf production there passed 20 million cars. That history is why a booing session in that hall carries political weight in Lower Saxony and in Berlin. A cut that leaves Wolfsburg standing but empties Emden or Zwickau still lands on the same union and the same state government.

Defence and Chinese models as substitutes

Switching a civilian car line to military vehicles is slow and politically noisy. It also depends on orders that governments have not all signed. Building Chinese-market EVs in Germany could keep halls busy if the cars can be sold in Europe or exported without losing money. Both ideas are attempts to avoid a locked gate. Neither is a contract yet.

Works council leaders and IG Metall have said they will fight compulsory redundancies and plant shutdowns. They have leverage that US or Chinese unions often lack: half the supervisory board, a state shareholder, and a workforce that can stop a line. Blume’s appeal to “pull together” is an admission that he cannot impose the June map without a fight he lost once already.

The numbers on the table will move in negotiation. Fifty thousand, 100,000, four plants, zero plants: those figures are opening positions. What did not move this week was the diagnosis. Chinese competition and US tariffs are shrinking the room in which Volkswagen’s German cost base can survive unchanged. The argument in Wolfsburg is no longer about whether something gives. It is about who pays, in which town, and how fast.