Attacks on jobs and social benefits at Opel, Germany part of global job cuts by Stellantis

The International Workers Alliance of the Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) is organising a meeting on Sunday, August 25 at 9 p.m. CET, “For global action to defend jobs at Warren Truck and around the world!” Click here to register.

In addition to cuts in Italy and the United States, Stellantis is also attacking jobs and collectively agreed social benefits at its European Opel plants. Works council representatives and IG Metall union officials have so far blocked any independent struggle by the workforce.

In the USA, Stellantis has announced 2,450 layoffs at Warren Truck Assembly Plant near Detroit. At Fiat in Italy, 12,000 redundancies have also been announced, which will result in the loss of a further 13,000 jobs in the supply industry. In Aspern, near Vienna, an Opel plant that once employed almost 2,000 people has just been closed.

Opel plants in Germany are also feeling the effects of the Stellantis management’s merciless austerity programme. In Eisenach, at the former Wartburg plant, workers alternate between periods of exhausting overwork and short shifts, during which their incomes fall sharply. In Kaiserslautern, a planned battery cell factory will not be built for now because the demand for electric cars is allegedly too low.

At Opel’s main plant in Rüsselsheim, the workforce has been cut from over 40,000 to less than 9,000, and further jobs in production and engineering are at risk. This year, another 1,000 jobs are to be cut. The International Technical Development Centre (ITEZ) in Rüsselsheim is also continuing to shrink, after a large part of it was sold to the French service provider Segula. The CAD technology department with 100 employees is currently being closed.

The Autoworkers Rank-and-File Committee Network has declared the assembly plant in Warren to be a “decisive battleground in the global war for jobs.” It is calling on all autoworkers worldwide to unite in defense of jobs. Because in globalised production, autoworkers’ allies are not the union leaders and national management, but their fellow autoworkers all over the world!

On 20 August, a team from the World Socialist Web Site distributed the call to “Stop the mass layoffs at Stellantis Warren Truck Assembly Plant!” during the shift change at Opel in Rüsselsheim and spoke to numerous production workers.

Almost all the workers who stopped to talk to the WSWS team about their American colleagues confirmed that the mood in the plant was “tense” or “bad.” They also said they often had to work on Saturdays. Of the 2,500 or so workers who build the Astra model here, around 40 percent are temporary workers who can be dismissed at any time.

“It’s always going downhill,” said a worker with over 15 years at the plant, “that’s what I’ve been experiencing here lately. We’re building the Astra now, but production is increasingly being shifted to temporary workers. We’re not getting enough information from the works council,” he continued. It seemed that “the works council reps are looking after themselves first.”