At the German auto supplier ZF, the fronts between the works council and management are hardening. “There is a list of plants that should be closed as quickly as possible,” said Achim Dietrich, head of the general works council, to the “Handelsblatt”. The management board advised by McKinsey focuses on a total of over a third of the 35 domestic plants.
A spokesman for the company said in Friedrichshafen that all German plants were being examined to determine their competitiveness. “There are some locations that do not achieve the necessary results. There, improvement measures must increase competitiveness. The first step is to answer the question of what we can do to get the locations back on the road to economic success in joint discussions with the employee representatives “to secure jobs in the long term with sustainable products”. Only if that doesn’t work would the last option be to sell the location or close it.
The company is heavily in debt
The head of the ZF general works council also said that this year the company had already “cut a little more than 1,000 jobs in Germany and a total of over 1,400 worldwide.” The board had announced that it would cut 11,000 to 14,000 jobs, or one in four jobs, in Germany in the coming years.
The entire auto industry is having problems with the transformation to electromobility, but ZF is being hit particularly hard. The group had become heavily indebted through acquisitions and investments in new technologies and has to pay more than half a billion euros in interest annually.
Dietrich sees ZF’s strategy of becoming a system provider through takeovers as being in danger. “If we don’t stick with the strategy and have to give up or sell the acquired businesses, it would be far too expensive,” said Dietrich. The head of the works council misses “a viable plan for the future” from the group management.
ZF is one of the world’s largest automotive suppliers with around 169,000 employees at 160 locations in 30 countries. The group is majority owned by the Zeppelin Foundation of the city of Friedrichshafen. In 2023 it achieved sales of around 46.6 billion euros.
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