Salvador Martínez Mas Berlin
Berlin
Updated Saturday, March 23, 2024-02:38
A small plane crosses the sky over Stuttgart with a message on a banner hanging from its tail:
"Bosch workers fight for their jobs."
On the ground there is a demonstration of 10,000 employees of the multinational engineering and technology company Bosch at the company's headquarters in Gerlingen, a town located next to Stuttgart, in southeast Germany.
That scene on Wednesday at Bosch headquarters is part of protests the likes of which have not been seen in the company in decades. Across the country, unions counted up to
25,000
Boschlers
- as Bosch workers are called here - demonstrating.
The concentration of the small plane was the most striking and the one that best reflects the social conflict in which Bosch finds itself due to the great
transformation that the automobile sector is undergoing, above all.
Bosch is one of the largest suppliers of equipment for the automotive industry. Among its traditional clients are big German names, although its client portfolio also includes firms from the thriving Chinese electric vehicle production industry.
The management of Bosch, in the hands of
Stefan Hartung
, plans to adapt to the new times of electric mobility by cutting 7,000 jobs around the world. Above all, they are going to target "the automotive supply division," according to the newspaper
Die Welt
.
In recent years,
4,000 jobs have already been cut
in a firm that has 427,600 workers around the world. In the coming years, Bosch plans, in Germany alone, to eliminate 3,200 positions in the automotive industry, according to accounts that have emerged as a result of the workers' mobilizations.
Hartung and his head of labor management, Stefan Grosch, present the measures as inevitable.
"The structural change in mobility"
is one of the factors cited to justify the cuts. Others have more to do with what Bosch understands to be customer containment and the bad economic situation.
German GDP contracted by 0.3% in 2023. In 2024, the German economy will barely grow 0.2%, according to the forecasts made by Chancellor
Olaf Scholz's government.
In this context, the economic newspaper
Handelsblatt
doubts that Bosch can avoid layoffs as they want in unions such as IG-Metall, the large organization of workers in the industrial sector in Germany. "In the past, layoffs used to be avoided. Whether this continues to be the case is more than questionable in the transformation towards electric mobility," stated
Handelsblatt
.
Among the workers who took to the streets this week, incomprehension reigns. Bosch has just signed
a year of profits
, despite the recession in Germany . The company's operating profits reached 4.6 billion euros in 2023, a record higher than that of 2022 (3.8 billion euros).
Layoffs and benefits are, in any case, the fuel for the mobilizations. "We ask Bosch to reconsider the cuts and talk to us. We look forward to responses and joint efforts to forge the future together," they say at IG-Metall. If there is no response, new days of mobilization are planned like the one on Wednesday.