The announcement by the VW Group that it is terminating the agreement on job security, cutting tens of thousands of jobs and closing entire plants and production sites in Germany is a declaration of war on all workers and marks the beginning of a new stage in the class struggle.

This has direct and far-reaching consequences for all VW employees and the working class as a whole. A struggle for power has begun. It is necessary for workers to respond with the same force and determination to the provocation of the capitalist owners and management.

All jobs at all locations must be defended in principle. No concessions must be made on wages, social benefits or other workers’ rights. The socialist principle, according to which the rights of workers take precedence over the profit drive of the oligarchs and billionaires, must be the starting point of the resistance.

When VW chairman Oliver Blume and VW brand director Thomas Schafer declare that mass layoffs, wage cuts and social cuts are unavoidable to ensure shareholder profits, then this means that the capitalist profit system has reached the end of the line. Production for profit stands in irreconcilable contradiction to the vital needs of workers and their families.

To defend jobs, the control of the IG Metall union apparatus and their works council representatives must be broken and new fighting organisations built to marshal and coordinate the resistance: independent rank-and-file action committees.

We call on all VW employees: Participate in the founding of the VW action committee. Register via WhatsApp message at +491633378340 or fill out the form at the end of the article and come to the first online meeting of the action committee on Wednesday, September 18 at 7 p.m. Participation can be anonymous.

The head of the VW central works council, Daniela Cavallo, may protest as loudly as she likes, but the plant closures and compulsory redundancies have all been discussed with the works council, the IG Metall trade union and the Social Democratic Party-led government. These forces have a majority on the VW supervisory board and work closely with the major shareholders, the oligarch Porsche and Piech clans.

Within the framework of organised corruption called “co-determination” (supposedly, “workers representation”), the highly paid functionaries of the IG Metall and the works council have long been committed to increasing shareholders returns at the expense of the workforce. The 2023 “Performance Programme,” which envisages savings of €10 billion by 2026, bears their signature. They will also implement the new cuts plans and sabotage any resistance to them. But now they can no longer claim that this will be done in a “socially acceptable” manner, excluding compulsory redundancies.

To defend jobs, workers must not allow themselves to be divided and must unite across company plants, corporations and countries. The cutbacks at VW in Germany are part of a global offensive by the auto companies, who are fighting a bitter battle for market share and higher profits and are using the conversion to electric vehicles to lay off hundreds of thousands.

Ford is closing its plant in Saarlouis and is now attacking workers in Cologne and Valencia in Spain. At Stellantis, “hardly a stone is left unturned,” as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung writes. Company boss Carlos Tavares, notorious as a “cost killer,” is destroying thousands of jobs in the United States and Italy. The Opel plant in Eisenach is not being spared either, and only 8,300 of the 15,000 jobs that once existed at Opel’s main plant in Russelsheim remain.

A real massacre is taking place in the supplier industry. ZF Friedrichshafen is cutting 14,000 jobs and Continental 7,000. Smaller companies with several hundred employees are closing almost daily. The software company SAP is also cutting 10,000 jobs, Thyssenkrupp is merging its steel division, the chemical company Bayer is cutting 5,000 jobs and BASF is closing two sites in Cologne and Frankfurt-Höchst.

But the unions are doing everything they can to isolate and suppress resistance. Even within each company, they prevent any solidarity actions and play workers from different locations off against each other, as in the infamous bidding war between the Ford plants in Saarlouis and Valencia.

The VW general works council is not lifting a finger to support their colleagues in Brussels, who are fighting against the closure of the Audi plant with the loss of 3,000 jobs. At the personnel service provider AutoVision, a joint venture between VW and the city of Wolfsburg that supplies VW with temporary workers, 1,500 of 3,600 jobs are at risk. Cariad, the group’s software division with 6,000 jobs, may be on the verge of closure altogether.

The end of the “social partnership”

For decades, the VW Group was considered the epitome of what was variously referred to as the “German co-determination model,” “Deutschland Inc” or “co-management.” In no other German company is the collaboration between owners, management and the trade unions as close and sophisticated as at Volkswagen.