Thursday, November 18, 2021
Site closure from the table
Berlin Mercedes plant to manufacture electric motors
The future of the Mercedes plant in Marienfelde has been uncertain for a long time. However, the car manufacturer is sticking to the location and making it the home of the in-house electric motor. However, new staff should not be added. The existing workforce will be retrained in e-mobility.
With the production of its first own electric motor, Daimler’s car subsidiary Mercedes-Benz wants to secure the future of its Berlin engine plant. The oldest production plant of the brand with the star is to build high-performance electric motors for AMG models in the future, the carmaker announced. The engines are being developed by the British startup Yasa, which Daimler intends to take over.
Electric motors for the other EQ brand e-cars are built by suppliers. Production of the company’s own diesel engines in Marienfelde is also being phased out. “We are thus offering pioneering perspectives for the traditional location and underlining its role in our global production network,” explained Mercedes production manager Jörg Burzer.
In March Daimler announced that it would work with Siemens to convert the almost 120-year-old location in Marienfelde into a digital campus. Last year, the IG Metall union and the works council feared the plant, which had around 2,500 employees at the time, in the course of the change to electromobility, and organized protests by the workforce. Now they have signed a company agreement with the company to qualify their employees. Compensation offers were also regulated. Burzer left it open how many of the currently 2,300 jobs will be kept in the long term and when electric motor production will start.
“Nobody will lose their job”
“We don’t necessarily want to recruit. We want to further qualify the people who work here,” emphasized the head of production. The union and works council expressed their satisfaction. Works council chief Michael Rahmel spoke of a decisive step towards the future. “Nobody will lose their job here, job security will remain in place until 2030,” said Rahmel. “November 18, 2021 will go down in Berlin’s industrial history as a good day,” declared IG Metall. “On the way to the factory of the future, even more jobs can be built in the next few years”, added the Berlin IG Metall representative Jan Otto.
The Berlin location is a symbol for the transformation, said Burzer. Over the next six years, a low three-digit million amount will be invested in Marienfelde, the smallest of the Mercedes component plants. Tape workers are retrained to become software coders who are supposed to use production data to develop algorithms for predictive maintenance. With this skill, Marienfelde will become a digital development and training center for the entire production network.