Fast food is filled with part time employees because those companies benefit from doing so, it’s one way to keep their costs down.
Rather than competition the larger story is companies trying to managing the EV transition. It’s inherently difficult when most buyers are still choosing ICE but EV’s need huge R&D investments and are generally unprofitable. We just entered the territory where sales aren’t small enough to simply absorb per unit losses as irrelevant.
I never said the dead weight is on the assembly line, because it's never there, it's in the offices and board rooms. VW for example is full of useless employee swinging their nutsacks (German expression for doing nothing) and cashing in near six figure wages and being unfireable. Meanwhile the workers on the assembly lines will have to loose their jobs.
As crazy as it sounds if you know anything about the industry, better management and increasing wages in China.
Chinese firms are generally extremely dysfunctional internally. That didn’t matter when they paid people a small fraction of western wages, but significant wage growth for years adds up. Continue ~9%/year wage growth and things would be at near parity in a little over a decade.
Obviously, that’s no guarantee but rapidly developing countries eventually develop. Things are about to get really interesting.
You can't have an answer if you're competing with a labor force that's working 9-9-6 while your labor force is working 35h weeks on paper (much less in practice), gets 40 vacation days per year, get paid sick leave whenever they don't feel like coming to work, and highly paid underperformers are unable to be fired due to unions.
German workers could afford that cushy lifestyle when their auto industry was the most cutting edge and valuable in the world, but once it's not anymore, they'll have to accept a new reality of more work for less pay if they want to have jobs or an industry.