Status: evening of 23 October 2026. After a review meeting in Hanover the timetable is set: Volkswagen and IG Metall will hold their first bargaining round in Emden on 24 November, with a second on 15 December in Zwickau – both sites have plants under threat. The new element is that the company wants to discuss “transfer companies” (Transfergesellschaften) as a way to shed part of the 12,000 additional jobs planned at the core Volkswagen brand. The union rejects the idea.
The background: at the end of September VW terminated ten collective agreements effective 31 December 2026 – practically the whole in-house pay deal covering about 130,000 employees in Germany. Pay scales, job grading, working-time rules and the collective allowance, currently €167 gross a month, are affected. Left untouched are the 2024 future agreement, which guarantees jobs until the end of 2030, and the early-retirement scheme. That deal envisaged cutting more than 35,000 jobs at German sites without compulsory redundancies, reducing labour costs by €1.5 billion a year and removing capacity for 734,000 vehicles. For the board under CEO Oliver Blume it is no longer enough: the turnaround plan foresees around 50,000 further job cuts group-wide by 2030, 12,000 of them at VW AG.
Why the transfer company is the real sticking point
The model is voluntary: employees move for a limited time into a separate company, where they are retrained and helped to find new work. VW speaks of transfer companies that are “eligible for funding”, which points to transfer short-time allowance (Transferkurzarbeitergeld) paid not by the company but from unemployment insurance. How many staff would be affected, for how long and with what severance is still open. Production, administration and development could all be included.
HR chief Arne Meiswinkel says the economic situation has deteriorated drastically and action is urgently needed; without economic success there can be no secure jobs in the long run. VW still stands by its job guarantee to 2030, he says. IG Metall’s regional chief Thorsten Gröger counters that taxpayers should not step in before shareholders take responsibility, and that subsidised transfer companies have mainly been used for plant closures. Works council chair Daniela Cavallo sees an attempt to undermine the job guarantee and called management’s approach a “Riesenaffront” – a huge affront.
Our reading: formally the job guarantee stays intact and the cuts become voluntary and “socially responsible”, but part of the bill would go to the public. That is exactly Gröger’s point. Whether the union ultimately accepts the tool alongside early retirement and severance probably depends on what it gets on pay and contract length in return.
What happens before the new year – and what staff should know
IG Metall demands that the terminations be withdrawn by the end of October. “A termination that has been delivered can also be withdrawn,” Gröger said. Otherwise, he warned, a “huge machinery” would prepare industrial action: “We are not seeking conflict, but we are prepared.” The peace obligation ends at the turn of the year, so warning strikes would be possible from 1 January 2027. The union wants a 5 per cent pay rise, longer early-retirement rules and job security into the 2030s. VW has not yet tabled concrete demands; it cites competitive labour costs and more flexible deployment of staff.
According to IG Metall, the terminated terms continue to apply to current employees until a new agreement is reached, but without future raises. It says this does not extend to new hires from 2027 and that jubilee-bonus entitlements lapse from January 2027. The union also says the agreements bind directly only its members. That is one party’s reading; VW has not commented on it.
Three paths are conceivable. An early compromise: longer terms and job security in exchange for restraint on pay. Escalation with warning strikes in January if VW does not withdraw the terminations. Or a middle way in which a voluntary, limited transfer company sits alongside early retirement. We consider the most plausible, with moderate confidence, a hard fight with strikes first and a compromise afterwards; inside the company, dpa-AFX reports, work stoppages are expected too.
Sources: Stuttgarter Zeitung (dpa), IG Metall Wolfsburg, dpa-AFX, dpa/ad-hoc-news, Münster Aktuell
