Due to the industry-wide shortage of chips, Volkswagen and Daimler are switching back to short-time working in some of their plants.

"There is short-time working in the Tiguan, Touran and Tarraco production as well as in the Golf production in late and night shifts," said a VW spokesman when asked about the procedure in the main plant in Wolfsburg in the coming week.

The early shift in golf production continues to produce.

According to the news agency dpa, some of the employees who work in production - for example in assembly, body construction, in the paint shop or in car production - are particularly affected.

In adjoining areas, too, there are sometimes lost working hours.

The reason are supply bottlenecks and the associated uncontrollable disruptions in delivery relationships from countries and regions directly or indirectly affected by the coronavirus.

Chip producers have new customers

In view of the delivery bottlenecks, Daimler once again sent thousands of employees to two German locations on short-time work this week. A Daimler spokeswoman said the factories in Bremen and Rastatt were affected. No prediction can be made about the effects. Daimler did not provide any specific figures. The short-time work is initially applied for by the end of the week, but does not extend to the entire locations. In Bremen, a large part of the employees is affected, in Rastatt it is about sub-areas. The "Stuttgarter Zeitung" and the "Stuttgarter Nachrichten" had previously reported on it.

More than 12,000 people are employed in the Bremen plant and around 6,500 in Rastatt. According to Daimler, shifts will also be canceled this week at the plant in Kecskemét, Hungary, where around 4,700 people work. The employees at these three and other Daimler locations had been temporarily put on short-time work over and over again in the past few months.

The background to this are global problems with the replenishment of electronic chips, because of which numerous car companies around the world have cut back their production and some employees have been on short-time work. The semiconductor components are in numerous electronic systems. Demand from the auto industry had risen for years, but then collapsed in the Corona crisis. The chip producers found new buyers, for example from IT, entertainment electronics or medical technology.