Workers at Volkswagen’s plant outside Brussels have blockaded the plant in a bitter protest sparked by plans to axe 4,000 workers and shift production of the Golf to VW’s German factories.
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A report in the British Daily Telegraph newspaper said VW had pleaded with the staff not to vandalise the factory as Flemish nationalists torched VW’s insignia in street bonfires.
The union vowed to stay out on strike until next week as VW prepares further drastic cuts in western Europe in the face of idle factories and a strong euro, switching instead to cheap-labour plants in Russia, China and India, the paper added.
A VW spokeswoman in Germany declined comment but said the automaker would be making a statement later on Thursday.
Separately, Agence France Presse (AFP) said the Brussels VW workers began negotiating compensation packages today, two days after learning that 4,000 jobs were to go at their plant.
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By GlobalDataAFP noted that, during a staff meeting on Wednesday, the shell-shocked workers had decided to go ahead – indefinitely – with a strike that started last week in anticipation of a job-cuts announcement.
Unions had earlier expressed their dissatisfaction at the VW supervisory board making no announcement after a regular meeting on Friday, delaying the confirmation until last Tuesday when VW finally announced it would end Golf production in Forest, Brussels, concentrating production at Wolfsburg and Mosel.
In its Tuesday statement, VW said it needed to “restructure the Brussels location, reflecting excess capacity in western Europe” and that “talks with employee representatives on a corresponding concept, under which the Golf will no longer be manufactured [there]” had started.
Volkswagen also said that, having initiated a far-reaching restructuring at its German locations, the core element of which is a reduction of up to 20,000 jobs, other locations “must” now be incorporated into the restructuring programme.
The company did say, though, it would retain the Brussels facility with slimmed-down workforce.
A German news agency, quoting local union sources, reported that the automaker was planning to axe 3,500 to 4,000 jobs.
VW production head Reinhard Jung on Tuesday told the dpa-AFX news agency that the company could continue to employ 1,500 people at the plant [building the Audi A3 already made there; the model shares its platform with the Golf].
Reports this week also noted that Volkswagen is expecting to save hundred of millions of euros by concentrating production of the Golf at two German plants – the gain will come mainly from better capacity utilisation there.
AFP said unions representing workers at the Belgian plant have been actively seeking reassurances for the future of the facility since Friday, when the Volkswagen group held a supervisory board meeting and failed to issue a clear statement on its plans for Brussels.
After the initial shock, workers turned their attention on Thursday to negotiating the conditions of the job cuts and plans to keep on as many workers as possible.
“Let’s stop talking about the factory as though it were dead. We first want to negotiate an industrial plan” to save as many jobs as possible, Manuel Castro, an official with the socialist FGTB union, told the news agency.
Following procedures put in place after the 1997 closure of a Renault factory north of Brussels, workers representatives can make “counter-proposals”, AFP noted.
However, many workers have resigned themselves to the expectation that the factory will be closed in a matter of months and consider their best hope to be securing the fat compensation packages, the report added.
Echoing Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt, the Belgian press reportedly accused Volkswagen of “economic nationalism”, preferring to cut jobs outside of Germany to reduce overcapacity.
“We’re not going to be had. Management is going to have to put money on the table before the first person leaves the company,” one union official reportedly told the staff meeting on Wednesday, which was attended by several thousand workers.
Since then, AFP said, officials at the federal, regional and EU levels have held a series of meetings aimed helping ease the pain of the jobs cuts, which have so far resulted in the formation of a “crisis group” of top officials.
“The aim is not to replace social dialogue between social partners, but to coordinate the regions’ actions in order to provide help rapidly and efficiently,” Benoit Cerexhe, labour minister for the Brussels region, told AFP.
The Daily Telegraph said the group’s Polo site outside Pamplona in Spain’s Basque region is thought to be “next for the chop”.
The paper noted that Belgium produces more cars per capita than even Germany, but the tax deals that lured the GM [Antwerp], Ford, Volvo [Ghent] and other automakers in the past have limited lives.
“Golf production will now be concentrated in Germany, mostly at the Wolfsburg headquarters once denigrated by managers as overmanned and a third less productive than Brussels,” the Daily Telegraph said.
Ferdinand Duvenhoffer, head of Germany’s Centre for Automotive Research, told the newspaper the Brussels plant was running at 60% capacity, a luxury in Europe’s cut-throat motor industry.
“VW has an over-capacity of at least 750,000 cars in western Europe: that’s basically two factories too many. There will undoubtedly have to be further cuts and we reckon it will be Pamplona,” he told the Daily Telegraph.
VW to end Belgian Golf assembly
