Daglig diskussion – 1 december 2024

Volkswagen står inför explosiva strejker över fabriksstängningar och jobbminskningar

Tens of thousands of Volkswagen workers will participate Monday in strikes at plants across Germany, labor union IG Metall said, marking the largest walkouts at the carmaker’s domestic operations since 2018.

The walkouts, which are planned to last several hours, follow weeks of collective bargaining negotiations during which VW refused to rule out mass layoffs and potential plant closures in its home market — drastic measures the company says are necessary to prop up its fortunes amid competition from China and weaker European demand.

A so-called “peace obligation” between worke…  rs and the company, which prohibited industrial action, expired on Saturday, allowing strikes to take place from Sunday at virtually all of Volkswagen’s German factories.

“If necessary, this will become the toughest wage dispute Volkswagen has ever seen,” IG Metall’s chief negotiator Thorsten Groeger said in a statement Sunday. “How long and intense this dispute will be is Volkswagen’s responsibility at the negotiating table.”

“Volkswagen has set our collective bargaining agreements on fire, and instead of extinguishing this fire during three rounds of negotiations, the management board keeps throwing open barrels of gasoline onto it,” he added.

The walkouts will be the first large-scale strikes that Volkswagen has faced since 2018, according to IG Metall, when 50,000 workers idled plants over pay. Although the work stoppages will last only a few hours, it is possible that 24-hour warning strikes could be called later this year. Indefinite strikes could also be called as a last resort, but only after members have been consulted again, IG Metall said.

The strikes represent a fresh headache for Europe’s largest automaker, which saw operating profit for the first nine months of the year tumble by a fifth from the previous year, as its flagship brand struggled. Vehicle sales also slipped on particularly weak demand in China, where it is losing market share to Chinese electric vehicle brands.

Bernie Sanders kritiserar försvarsutgifterna: 'Elon Musk har rätt'

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Sunday criticized defense spending in a post on the social platform X, saying that tech billionaire Elon Musk “is right.”

“Elon Musk is right. The Pentagon, with a budget of $886 billion, just failed its 7th audit in a row. It’s lost track of billions,” Sanders said in his post.

“Last year, only 13 senators voted against the Military Industrial Complex and a defense budget full of waste and fraud. That must change,” he added.

Last month, President-elect Trump appointed Musk and biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy as the heads of a new “Depar…  tment of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), which aims to “slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures” and restructure federal agencies.

DOGE would “provide advice and guidance from outside of government” and work alongside the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, the president-elect said.

On Monday, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) suggested in an interview on CNN that Democrats could work with Musk’s DOGE on cutting the defense budget. The California Democrat criticized “waste, fraud and abuse” in the defense budget and said the Defense Department “has failed the last six or seven audits.”

Khanna also posted a clip of his CNN appearance from that day on X.