Massive job cuts loom at Alstom factories in eastern Germany

Barely a year after the so-called “Future Contract” was agreed between Germany’s biggest trade union, IG Metall, and the rail vehicle manufacturer Alstom, it is already clear that massive relocations of production and redundancies are on the cards.

Alstom, which employs a total of 9,600 people at 13 sites in Germany, announced at the end of last week that its rail car construction division is to be relocated to Poland.

The announcement confirms the statements of an Alstom regional director, who was recently quoted in the Handelsblatt newspaper as saying that the utilisation of its German sites was no longer part of the company’s strategy. Instead, orders were to be redirected to Wroclaw and Katowice in Poland. The company’s German plants in Bautzen and Görlitz would then be given the work that could not be carried out in Poland or had to be improved. This is exactly what is now being realised.

The plant in Görlitz, which still has 700 employees, will be hit particularly hard and will no longer receive new orders for the construction of rail cars. Görlitz is currently still building double-decker carriages for Israel and Deutsche Bahn (German Rail) and tram car bodies for Leipzig. These orders are still being processed and are scheduled to end in mid-2026.

Production will also be greatly reduced at the Hennigsdorf, Bautzen and Salzgitter sites. Hennigsdorf, the largest plant, with around 2,000 jobs, could be reduced to a development and service site. At a plant meeting in Hennigsdorf on 28 May, the workforce was informed that what happens after 2026 will depend on the order books.

The current announcements continue a long series of job losses that have been imposed at every level by IG Metall and the works councils it controls.

The plant in Görlitz, which has a 150-year history, currently employs only 700 workers. There were already mass redundancies in 2017, when the plant still belonged to the Bombardier group. At that time, 2,500 people were employed at the site, but 1,250 jobs were lost.

IG Metall agreed to the destruction of a total of 2,200 jobs, even though the Bombardier workers in Hennigsdorf were prepared to defend their jobs and took to the streets in their thousands to do so. The works council and IG-Metall promised the workforce that management would invest 8 million euros in the plant. In the end, only 1 million euros was pulled out of the hat.

Bombardier was taken over by Alstom at the beginning of 2021. This was part of the global concentration process in railway construction and linked to a programme of fierce rationalisation.

In connection with the mobility transition, the rail industry is experiencing strong growth in Europe and around the world, promising huge profits. The German Railway Industry Association reported record sales of 7.8 billion euros for the first half of 2023, following 13.9 billion in sales for 2022 as a whole. A handful of large corporations are fighting for supremacy on the global market. This is taking place at the expense of workers in every country.

Alstom, which is expecting sales growth of 5 percent for 2023/2024, is positioning itself for this fight. This means a continuation of the process that impacted former Bombardier employees after the takeover in 2021: i.e., continuous job losses and wage cuts in return for worthless promises to maintain plants. None of these agreements are worth the paper they were written on.

The most recent manoeuvre, the “Future Contract” that IG Metall agreed with Alstom in April 2023, was bound up with significant wage cuts for workers. The waiver of holiday pay saved the company a total of 34 million euros per year. In return, the management promised to invest in the future.