Staff at Opel’s Ruesselsheim car plant in Germany have offered to work longer hours without extra pay if parent company General Motors picks it as the site to build its next generation of mid-sized cars.
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Reuters said the offer ups the stakes in a competition with a Saab plant in Sweden to win the contract for building a replacement model for the Saab 9-3 and Opel Vectra. Both plants fear job cuts or closure if they lose out and GM is due to decide early in 2005.
“Assuming that the Epsilon II comes to Ruesselsheim we are prepared to expand the current working-time corridor model,” Opel works council chief Klaus Franz told the news agency on Thursday, referring to the new car platform set to be launched in 2008.
He proposed widening the band so that staff could put in between 30 and 40 hours a week for average pay of 35 hours. That lets workers clock extra hours without overtime pay during busy periods and then draw down the hours when demand slackens. The corridor now stands at 32 to 38.75 hours.
Reuters noted that GM Europe’s workers have vowed not to let the US company play one factory off against another in allocating work but are in a tough spot given GM’s plans to cut up to 12,000 jobs in Europe as a way to stem five years of losses in the region.
Volkswagen’s 103,000 staff in western Germany agreed on Wednesday to accept a pay freeze until early 2007 in return for job security through to 2011 and a one-off payment of 1,000 euros ($US1,271) next year – a deal that saves Europe’s biggest carmaker €1 billion, the report added.
Reuters also noted that governments are also getting in on the act to preserve jobs. Sweden said on Tuesday it would spend 2 billion crowns ($280 million) more on roads and rail in the region where Saab is located to help persuade GM to give it work on the mid-sized car, while the German government has said it would support worker training at Ruesselsheim for the people who would build the new car and would use its influence with the consortium that supplies energy to the plant to ensure it got competitive prices.
