Yes, they are going to give older workers good conditions for early retirement and will not replace those exact positions. The work council has agreed to the conditions.

Also, they are creating 9k new jobs in e-mobility.

Trouble is the "good ones" take the redundancy in a lot of cases

yes, probably b/c the good ones know they can find employment elsewhere without too much difficulty.

Not that simple. Depends on the deal but taking retirement and redundancy are very different things.

This looks like a retirement package which means they can't take a new job, if I understand it correctly.

Having faced layoff in both Europe and US. The laws are a world apart.

Cant take a new job! I cant believe that it violates so many eu rules and the employees human rights.

Of course it might not make sense if you are near state retirement age.

Of course this is outwith things like medical retirement ie you have a terminal illness

Why would it violate anything?

When you retire, you are basically stating that you are unfit or unwilling to continue working, and as such the company you have worked for all this time should continue to pay your living expenses.

Getting a new job basically says that you can and want to continue working.

Well id need to see the schemes rules but certainly in the UK you can take a pension now and work - or you can defer it and take it later.

Typically you would defer and work at the new job 90% of the people who built out the uk's mobile network did this.

They took redundancy from the GPO /BT got a huge pay off (3 years salary tax free) and 6 extra years on the pension and then worked for the competition.

And a pension is deferred pay not some grace and favour hand out from a feudal lord. And for some DB schemas when you hit the max years it makes sense to take redundancy as you cant build up any more pension.

Pensions are deferred pay not a hand out.

Also, I can't do this is different from I can't do anything. Many people have part time or lower stress jobs in retirement as something to do. Working a 40+ hour week on a factory floor is much more demanding than teaching a welding class 2 days a week at the local community collage.

My experience working for a German company is that there's a strong cultural distaste for laying off employees. I've seen major projects get shut down, and I saw huge cost-saving measures after the 2008 downturn, but there was never any question of letting people go. People got moved to other projects, or had enforced, unpaid vacations, but no layoffs.

I suspect it's driven by strong employee protections in German law.

Huh? Enforced, unpaid vacation == layoff doesn't it? "You still work here but won't be paid"

I assume it's like we need to save 1/12 of employment costs, so everyone is forced to take one month vacation.

This is called furlough. US and state governments do it sometimes too, though usually a day or two at a time.

Exactly. The company needed to save a ton of money in 2009, so, instead of laying anyone off, they gave everyone an extra 4 weeks of vacation and an equivalent cut in their salary for the year.

It still amounts to punishing the workers for the failings of management.

You've never run a business, have you?

Your comment isn't aligned with reality on many fronts. Take it from someone who had to pay for employee salaries using credit cards and a second mortgage on my home back in 2008/9 just to keep them employed as long as possible while searching for solutions.

That is not how business works. Mangers don't have crystal balls. On the other hand, if they did, and saw the massive 2008 economic downturn, it's likely people would have been laid off en-masse months before they did. Good management doesn't mean you see every single approaching storm. And, no, corporations are not evil or greedy.

Shit happens and you deal with it as best you can. Most people think large companies have more wiggle room but that is generally not true at all. Their mass and scale can be very damaging.

I remember talking to one of our automation (as in hardware, not software) suppliers back in 2009. Their orders went from 1,200 machines per month to 200. And this happened, quite literally, over one or two quarters.

When you have an infrastructure built-up over time to service a certain level of business and, overnight, almost without warning, your business gets cut down to one sixth of it's prior size, well, things have to change and they have to change very quickly.

The options are: Drain the company of all cash, everyone loses their jobs and the company goes out of business. Or, lay-off a sizable portion of your workforce, sell off assets, restructure and generally do anything you can to stay alive, remain viable and see daylight on the other side of the singularity that tried to kill you.

Do you really think corporations aren't greedy? Which I do not think is evil. I know business is hard, but the whole model of cutthroat profit seeking (which encourages bad faith actors) is what I have a problem with, so it's not exactly a compelling defense.

Can you please provide examples of "cutthroat profit seeking"?

I am looking for numbers.

  - Product retail price
  - Materials costs
  - Sub-assembly costs
  - Labor costs
  - Spoilage
  - Operating costs
  - Variable costs related to that product or product line
  - Inventory levels
  - Distribution pipeline details
  - Transporation costs
  - Cost of distribution
  - Insurance
  - Legal costs
  - Other regulatory costs
  - Marketing costs
  - Support costs
  - Costs incurred due to exchange rate fluctuations

And compare these to the same numbers for the next competitor down the line.

You might just be surprised by what you learn through this simple exercise.

Not necessarily. Perhaps there actually are too many workers for the amount of work there is.

If you aren't selling enough product, you have to slow the factory down. But factories often don't slow down efficiently, it can be better to just work 4-day weeks for a while.

It's not really managements fault that we have a boom-bust economy.

And... I think most people prefer a little collective belt tightening and to the risk of losing their livelihood.

Which is another failure of management, and still causing the workers to be punished.

Managers are not oracles, they can't always anticipate boom and bust cycles on the market, nor - if they can - does it always make sense to scale production capacity down and back up if the cycles are short.

It used to, but companies so often never ended that vacation that (at least in my experience) it now means a mass firing.

Pay cut != layoff

Also, 30k over 10 years or so is not that much if you employ 600k.

Correct, just attrition.

This is so much better - instead of people chasing latest management gossip, constantly looking over their shoulder and looking for other jobs, we don't hire unless it's necessary (ie regulatory requirements).

Compared to having 2-3 random firing rounds per year when it was semi-random (even the best of the team were let go because they didn't have currently running long term project), morale is much higher (random meant you come in the morning like every other day, suddenly during day there is interview with your line manager and HR, then you have 5 mins to take your stuff from desk and are escorted by security out, and that's it)

Better unless you are an early career worker looking for a job.

Christ, what country are you in?

Sounds like the US to me. Did I ever tell you about the time when I came in to work on Friday and found out that the next Wednesday would be the last day of work for everybody in the office? Sorry, folks, no severance either. If you have vacation days left, you'll be paid for those as you use them. Otherwise, each departing employee will be provided with 60% of a tissue to wipe away most of their tears.

It will probably be foreign subsidiaries who get the chop - German companies who are all into codetermination at home will hire American union busters to attack unions in other countries

All of those jobs are supposed to be cut by socially acceptable means (e.g. by early or partial retirement). 23k of those 30k of cut jobs are supposed to be in Germany.

(But in the past Volkswagen participated in union busting in foreign plants.)