Severance payments and short-time work: Airbus does not lay off

Severance payments and short-time work
Airbus refrains from layoffs

There will be no layoffs at the European aircraft manufacturer Airbus. More than 2000 employees leave the group voluntarily. Otherwise, it does what it should do with short-time work – it secures jobs. However, not every employee will find his or her workplace in the same place in the future.

At the aircraft manufacturer Airbus, the management and employees have agreed an anti-crisis program without layoffs in Germany. Nevertheless, jobs are being lost – in the north at the aircraft factory in Hamburg-Finkenwerder and at other locations. 2300 employees left the company voluntarily, said the chairman of the group works council, Holger Junge.

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In France, Germany and Great Britain there will be no layoffs, Airbus announced after a meeting with the European works council. The measures taken for social cushioning have had an impact. The prerequisite is an increased internal mobility of the employees. In Spain the negotiation process started later, there the adjustment measures were still ongoing.

Because of the travel restrictions and the slump in air traffic in the Corona crisis, the European aircraft manufacturer had to cut its production by 40 percent. Last July, the company announced that it would cut 15,000 jobs worldwide – including one in ten of the 50,000 in Germany.

Airbus CFO Dominik Asam had recently said that "a few thousand fewer jobs" could be lost because of the short-time allowance in Germany and France and because of funding for research. "The layoffs are off the table," announced the works council in Munich. Offers to leave the company were so well received that it was possible to "overcome the greatest crisis in the company's history without layoffs," said Junge.

Internal reorganization

At Airbus in Germany about 1,300 employees went voluntarily, he said. Most of them worked in Finkenwerder, Stade, Bremen or Buxtehude in the north. Around 1000 employees have left the subsidiary Premium Aerotec. The supplier has large plants in Nordenham and Varel in Lower Saxony and in Augsburg in Bavaria.

"The downsizing at the trunk has been completed," said Group works council chief Junge. The overhang of 5100 jobs announced by Airbus in Germany was always only an arithmetic variable. The remaining overcapacity will be reduced by short-time working until the end of 2021 and by reducing working hours in 2022 and 2023. The agreement means that all Airbus sites will continue to exist, the works council boss said.

After the volunteers have left, however, the number of staff has to be balanced. This means that many employees have to change their job or even the plant. It is also known that Airbus is rethinking its structure. The works council will therefore ensure that all locations are "clearly structured and remain systemically relevant".

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