VW to let go of remaining temporary employees in Zwickau in 2025

VW still employed more than 2,500 temporary workers in Zwickau in 2023. According to the German publication Freie Presse, there are currently around 1,000 employees with fixed-term contracts remaining due to contracts that have already expired. However, as was already apparent in the summer, they will also have to leave at the end of 2025: Their contracts will not be extended. A VW spokesperson told the Freie Presse that the order situation has hardly improved – and that no positive change is to be expected in the near future.

The affected employees are not prepared to accept this in silence. They have now written an open letter to the top management in Wolfsburg and Saxony as well as to representatives of the federal and state governments. In it, they hold the Group management and politicians responsible for the “decline”. The year 2024 felt like a “death in instalments”, they say at one point. “We feel let down by politicians and the Executive Board […], we now have to pay for this failure across the board.” In the meantime, the situation has become even worse: “Our permanent colleagues are also living and working in uncertainty.”

The plans for the job cuts are said to have been in the drawer for some time. The focus is on those fixed-term employment contracts that expire at the end of next year. Volkswagen has already made savings on temporary employees in 2023 and 2024. According to Zwickau Radio, 1,000 employment contracts have also been allowed to expire this year, but around 700 fixed-term employees have been offered a permanent position. In 2023, the number of expired contracts is said to have totalled around 270.

The reason for this is the sluggish demand for e-cars from the VW Group. Against this backdrop, the two production lines at the Zwickau plant were switched to two-shift operation (without night shifts) in September. Since then, fewer workers have been needed, but the company wants to “remain flexible” in case demand picks up again, a VW spokesperson was quoted as saying by MDR in July.

As of July, around 9,400 people work at the Zwickau plant. In comparison, before the Zwickau factory was converted into a pure electric car production facility, between 6,500 and 7,500 employees worked in Zwickau. A large wave of recruitment began in 2019. According to the fire letter, the sales difficulties were not foreseeable until 2022.

The VW ID.3 and the Cupra Born are produced on production line one at the factory in Saxony. VW’s ID.4 and ID.5 as well as Audi’s Q4 e-tron and Q4 Sportback e-tron roll off the production line on line two. From the second half of 2023, there were production breaks on-site, for example, in October 2023, when Volkswagen stopped production line one for around two weeks due to weak demand. However, production of the two models then resumed in three-shift operation. In November and December 2023, however, the workforce was hit by more bad news: First, the night shift was cancelled in the production of the VW ID.3 and Cupra Born, after which VW completely shut down production of the two electric cars.

freiepresse.de (Paywall), radiozwickau.de, static.radiozwickau.de (open letter, all in German)