WOLFSBURG (dpa-AFX) - Following the collective agreement at Volkswagen, works council leader Daniela Cavallo has called on the board of management to quickly present proposals for pay cuts at itself. "My expectation is that the board will make a statement to that effect to the supervisory board by February at the latest and that the supervisory board will then also decide on it," she said in an interview published on the intranet and seen by the dpa news agency.
"The board has already stated that the waiver is disproportionately higher for management," Cavallo said. "It just needs to be implemented now." Chief Human Resources Officer Gunnar Kilian recently announced that management below the executive board is expected to contribute over 300 million euros to the savings program by 2030. This affects around 4,000 managers.
Job cuts without layoffs
Shortly before Christmas, the company and the union agreed after a long struggle on a restructuring program that will cut 35,000 jobs in Germany by 2030. The reduction is to be achieved without layoffs.
Cavallo did not comment on whether the final figure would actually be reached. "The stock market likes these kinds of numbers," she said. "But whether this magnitude can be achieved is a very complex question with many variables." The works council will, "as always, take a critical view."
Overall, Europe's largest carmaker wants to reduce labor costs by 1.5 billion euros annually. In the short term, the waiver of various bonus payments and wage increases will be noticeable. In addition, the tariff structure is to be revised by 2027 and approximated to the lower area tariff.
"In the future, trees will no longer grow as fast as they did in the past."
"The collective agreement compromise includes many points won by the employee side, but there are also painful cuts," Cavallo admitted. "Yes, in the future the trees will no longer grow as fast into the sky as they used to." At the same time, she countered fears that the new pay scale structure would mean the end of the previous company wage agreement. "The opposite is the case," she said. "We have secured our company wage agreement in the long term."
She described the goal stated by VW of reducing the wage bill by six percent in the long term as an upper limit that had been agreed. This also provided a safeguard for employees in the event of a downturn. However, it is still completely open what the outcome of the analysis of the company wage agreement will be. "Nobody can prejudge the result."/fjo/DP/jha