On the occasion of the debate about a possible split of the car manufacturer Opel, the Hessian IG Metall boss Jörg Köhlinger clearly criticized Opel parent Stellantis.

At the moment it is not at all clear which strategy the group is pursuing, said Köhlinger.

At the same time, he says that the company is trying to undermine the co-determination rights of the workforce in Germany.

Falk Heunemann

Business editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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The auto company Stellantis, which emerged from the merger of PSA and Fiat Chrysler at the beginning of this year, is apparently planning to separate the plants in Rüsselsheim and Eisenach from the Opel company. In addition, employees at the development center in Rüsselsheim fear losing their jobs and moving jobs to Morocco. In Eisenach, due to the global shortage of chips, the group had closed the plant in which the Opel Grandland X is manufactured and ordered short-time work. The Opel models Insignia and Astra as well as the DS4 are produced at the headquarters in Rüsselsheim.

Köhlinger criticized that Stellantis made “decisions in back rooms”. The management of the French Stellantis predecessor group PSA, which took over Opel from General Motors in 2017, repeatedly shows the approach of making decisions without informing. However, this only stirs up further fears and mistrust among the workforce. A real strategy cannot be seen, said the head of the IG Metall district in the center, which includes Hessen as well as the federal states of Rhineland-Palatinate, Saarland and Thuringia. For him it is not understandable how great efficiency gains can be achieved by changing the corporate form.

Köhlinger expressly did not want to speculate whether Stellantis wanted to split up the companies in order to reduce the right of the works council to have a say. If a company has at least 2,000 employees, half of the supervisory board must be made up of employee representatives (the chairman of the employer side has double voting rights). If it is less than 2000, it only has to be a third.

"With such a change in corporate law, we would probably have more works councils and not fewer," said the union leader. Then there might no longer be the same general works council, but several works councils at the locations. The management should rather concentrate on developing and selling marketable vehicles. Opel, as the only German brand in the group, has to be looked after and preserved. “The brand essence must not be damaged. There must be a clear perspective for the locations, as promised when the takeover in 2017 was made. "

According to Stellantis, Opel achieved an operating profit of 527 million euros last year.

From January to September 2021, 121,000 Opel cars were sold in Germany, an increase of 27 percent compared to 2020. In the first nine months of this year, Opel grew significantly faster than its competitors VW, Ford, Fiat, Audi and Skoda , Mercedes and BMW.

However, the fact that the previous Opel boss Michael Lohscheller left the company surprisingly in September caused a stir.

He had led the automaker into profitability after 20 years.