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Volkswagen Shop Floor Meeting in Wolfsburg


June 2006
 Filed under: VOLKSWAGEN CORPORATE Car News | VOLKSWAGEN CORPORATE Headlines

Chairman of the Volkswagen Brand Group: “We need to become more competitive”

Wolfsburg, 15 June 2006 - At the shop flor meeting of the Volkswagen plant in Wolfsburg, Dr. Wolfgang Bernhard, Chairman of the Volkswagen Brand Group, urgently requested employees to provide their support for the restructuring of the company.
“We build great cars, but in terms of costs we are far from reaching our targets,” Bernhard said on Thursday before an audience of over 18,000 Volkswagen employees. “Let us all pull in the same direction. Help us make this site fitter so that your jobs will be safe,” he appealed. “The Wolfsburg plant needs to come off the substitutes’ bench and go onto the attack.”

Bernhard said that it was in some cases not possible to produce cars and components competitively at the Group’s West German plants because these plants were currently reporting losses running into three figures in millions of euros. He reported that labor costs in Wolfsburg were more than a third higher than at other German car plants.

Bernhard mentioned the material cost savings that had already been achieved, improvements in production and reductions in basic costs in all units of the company. “Now we must make our labor costs competitive. If we succeed, it will be possible to produce cars competitively in Wolfsburg,” the Chairman of the Brand Group said to the employees who attended. “Competitiveness means safe jobs and the best way of making sure that we are competitive is to work offensively and intensively on quality, costs and strong sales performance. That applies not only to direct production units but especially to departments that are indirectly involved.”

He said that Volkswagen employees earned as much for a working week of 28.8 or 30 hours as other car industry workers for 35 hours. “Under these conditions, no-one will be able to produce cars in Germany in the future. We want to make the Golf in Wolfsburg in the future, but only if the company does not have to subsidize every car we produce here. This is why we need to bring labor costs to a competitive level in addition to a number of other points,” Bernhard said. He stressed that no employee was to receive a lower annual income despite the seriousness of the situation. The 35-hour working week was only to be introduced step by step when there were actually enough orders to justify longer working hours.

Bernhard explained that it would be possible to secure a sustainable future for Volkswagen with new models, higher productivity, lower production expenses and full capacity employment at the company’s plants. This would also include the development of a uniform Group collective pay agreement for Volkswagen, Auto 5000, Auto Vision and other subsidiaries. “This will give us the flexibility we need for modern car production in the face of relentless competition.”

Source: Volkswagen

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