From our other sites
The story
Volkswagen (VW) has announced it will terminate nearly all of its labor agreements by the end of 2026. VW describes the move as a way to “open room for negotiation.” On the German-language forum Lemmy’s c/dach community, the announcement set off a wave of criticism aimed at management. Commenters pointed to lawsuit costs from the emissions scandal (Dieselgate) and years of poor management decisions, brought up past massive dividends and executive bonuses, and the discussion branched out into comparisons of price-to-quality, Škoda, Cupra, Chinese automakers, and the high price of VW’s EVs.
Volkswagen terminates nearly all labor agreements
Source: tagesschau.de / Original article here
What people said
Drop the "b" from "zusammengeklaubt" (scraped together) and you get "zusammengeklaut" (swiped) — fixed that for you.
If there's no more gilding left, I guess they can just drink paint thinner instead (a riff on Marie Antoinette's "let them eat cake").
The value for money has been bad for at least 20 years, quality's been sliding downhill since the early 2000s, and yet the price keeps climbing at the exact same pace. And now they're even screwing over the employees who are stuck building this junk — at this point there's genuinely no reason left to buy a VW.
The ID.Polo actually looks like decent value, though. For anything else, you might as well just buy a Škoda — it's basically the same model with a different badge, and cheaper.
I'm currently driving a Cupra Born (basically a VW underneath), and it's great — good range, easy to drive. The ID.7 doesn't look bad either, decent trunk space. So they can actually pull it off when they put their minds to it.
Well, if you count two digits after the decimal point, it technically is six figures…
Haha, I bet the PR person who came up with that phrasing is already getting a €1 million bonus.
Meanwhile the ID.7 starts at a cool €75,000, no shame about it at all. You can get the same trunk space and range from a Chinese automaker for less than half that. Why should I have to pay extra just to fund executive bonuses and strategic incompetence?
Fair point, but the key thing is that 70% or more of new car registrations are under company names. So most of these go through corporate leases or company-car perks. If you're buying as a private individual, pretty much only retirees can afford a German-made EV. (Except for the compact models — those are at least somewhat within reach.)
No no, the point is that to VW's shareholders and executives, employee wages and jobs simply don't carry any value. By the way, that word comes from a southern German/Austrian dialect.
That doesn't change the fact that it still isn't theirs, though.
Has anything actually gotten better since Lopez (José Ignacio López, VW's former cost-cutting purchasing chief)?
No, it's only gotten worse since. The only reason the models that already existed when he took over survived is that even he couldn't manage to ruin them completely.
trollercoaster, that's exactly the heart of it.
Background and Key Points
In Germany, a “termination notice” (Kündigung) for a labor agreement (Tarifvertrag) is a labor-negotiation tactic: it cuts off the current agreement at its set expiration date and forces renegotiation under new terms. Termination does not automatically mean an immediate cut to pay or benefits. VW has spent the past several years in repeated labor negotiations over EV investment, plant closures, and job cuts, and this latest move is an extension of that pattern. The emissions scandal (Dieselgate) repeatedly mentioned in the thread came to light in 2015, and the related fines and legal costs are still known to weigh on the company’s earnings today. That said, no specific figures or sources were cited regarding the fairness of dividends or executive pay, so it’s worth noting that the comments in the thread reflect posters’ impressions rather than verified data.
*This article is a condensed, loosely translated adaptation by our editorial team of the thread “Volkswagen kündigt fast alle Tarifverträge” from the overseas forum Lemmy c/dach. Our site takes responsibility for the translation.
Leave a Reply