German trade union, works council and Bombardier management unite to impose plant shutdown in stages
By
Gustav Kemper
13 July 2017
Employees at Bombardier’s long standing rail carriage manufacturing facility in Hennigsdorf were confronted with a united front of company management, works council, IG Metall trade union officials, and Social Democrats (SPD) last Friday. At an employees’ meeting, they all declared in virtually the same terms why they support the June 29 decision by the company’s supervisory board, which will mean the elimination of almost one in four jobs at Bombardier.
For an hour-and-a-half close to 1,000 Bombardier workers, who had gathered in the town’s sports hall, were bombarded with buzzwords such as “efficiency,” “profitability,” “competence centre” and “industry 4.0.”
For more than a year, the IG Metall union and works council had been promising at protest rallies to lead a struggle to defend jobs. At the entrance to the sports hall, IG Metall once again hung its banner with the slogan, “We will not allow ourselves to be discarded.”
Instead, they have abandoned any pretense of struggle. The employees’ meeting was aimed at preparing the workers for the shutdown, in stages, of the venerable rail carriage manufacturing plant in Hennigsdorf, where some 2,300 workers are still employed. The supervisory board’s decision will hit the facilities in Hennigsdorf and Görlitz particularly severely. In Hennigsdorf, only a so-called global competency centre for the development of trains will remain, with jobs for “highly-qualified” workers, as company management put it.
[photo: Hennigsdorf workers after the employees’ meeting]
Michael Wobst, the works council chairman and deputy chairman of the supervisory board, sought in a…