The Airbus plant in Varel will not be sold, but will remain within the group and will be restructured.

This decision was not made by the management, but by the workforce itself, or more precisely, the union members among the employees who were called to vote last Friday and this Monday.

74.5 percent of the IG Metall members among the employees voted for the Varel plant to remain.

Susanne Preuss

Business correspondent in Hamburg.

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1173 employees voted, that is 94 percent of those entitled to vote.

The degree of organization in the East Frisian plant is so high that almost the entire workforce voted with it.

It wasn't an easy decision, however.

In a month-long struggle over the future of the structure of the Airbus Group, IG Metall negotiated precisely this grassroots democratic decision-making option.

The supplier Mubea from North Rhine-Westphalia was available as a potential investor for the plant, having promoted its solution with several visits from top managers in the past few weeks.

Accordingly, the medium-sized company in Varel saw the opportunity to reduce its dependence on the car industry and to expand business with the aircraft industry.

For this purpose, the workforce in Varel should be increased to 1450 jobs in the next few years.

Emotional debate about both concepts

On the other hand, remaining within the Airbus Group will only be possible with a restructuring that envisages a reduction in the workforce from currently around 1,200 to 1,000 employees by 2025.

However, this was not a threat scenario for the active employees.

According to the agreement with IG Metall from January until 2030, redundancies for operational reasons are excluded if they remain in the Airbus Group.

In the case of the investor solution, jobs would have been guaranteed until 2033.

The debates about these two concepts were conducted emotionally, but at the same time with a great awareness that the future prospects for the plant are at stake, reported Daniel Friedrich, head of IG Metall Coast.

Now talks about the restructuring of the Varel plant will be started in the short term with those responsible for Airbus and will hopefully be concluded in May, said Friedrich.

Then the new structure of Airbus, which has been negotiated for so long, could be implemented on July 1 as planned.