Friday 10th December 2021
1300 jobs are to be eliminated
Alstom is using the red pencil in East Germany
The French rail technician Alstom is streamlining the business. The background is on the one hand the takeover of a division of the competitor Bombardier as well as underutilized factories. It hits the locations in Brandenburg and Saxony. In contrast, there will be new jobs in West Germany.
After the merger with Bombardier’s train division, the French rail technology group Alstom will cut around every tenth position in Germany over the next three years. In total, up to 1300 of the almost 10,000 jobs could be lost. Business in Germany is about to undergo major restructuring, an Alstom spokesman confirmed to information from the IG Metall trade union.
The production of trains will be scaled back and some of them will be relocated abroad, for which 600 to 700 jobs are to be created, primarily in signaling technology and software. Alstom is committed to making job cuts as socially acceptable as possible, for example with internal transfers, further training, early retirement and severance payments. IG Metall announced resistance to the plans.
“In order to strengthen the long-term competitiveness of production, it will be more closely integrated into a European production network,” announced Alstom. This means that the utilization of capacities can be optimized. Some plants in Germany are “structurally underutilized”. According to IG Metall, the East German locations are mainly affected by the dismantling: Hennigsdorf near Berlin with 350 to 450 jobs and Görlitz with 300 to 400. The plant in Kassel is not affected, the company said. The new jobs are to be created primarily in Mannheim, Berlin and Braunschweig.
Germany will remain the country with the largest workforce in the merged group. At the beginning of 2021, the then head of Bombardier Transportation, Danny di Perna, tried to allay the workforce’s fear of the takeover by Alstom: This will not result in large-scale job cuts. “Our books are full of orders,” said the current Alstom manager at the time. “As far as we know today, there will be no need for a restructuring program in the foreseeable future.”
The head of the general works council at Alstom in Germany, René Straube, condemned the downsizing as “short-sighted and criminal”. That makes it more difficult to achieve the climate targets and the traffic turnaround. “Adjusting staff to capacity utilization is the wrong approach. Adjusting capacity utilization to capacity is the order of the day.” The IG Metall district manager for Berlin-Brandenburg-Saxony, Birgit Dietze, said the union would not accept the dismantling without objections. “We are facing up to the economic challenges, but we want solutions that – unlike pure staff cuts – pay off for the future.”