Dark clouds are hanging over Zwickau in Saxony, Germany these days, and not just because of the winter weather. The Volkswagen plant there, which currently employs 9,500, is particularly hard hit by the company’s plans to cut production.
According to the plans of VW and agreed to by the IG Metall union, the Audi Q4 e-tron and its estate version, the Q4 e-tron Sportback, will be the only models still built in Zwickau from 2027 onward. The VW ID.3, ID.4, ID.5 and Cupra Born models are currently still produced there, but these will be moved to Wolfsburg and Emden.
The uncertain future of the Volkswagen plant is a constant topic in the regional press. “Cost-cutting measures at Volkswagen in Zwickau: Is the East losing out once again?” was the headline in the Chemnitz-based Freie Presse newspaper a few days ago.
The federal government’s Commissioner for Eastern Germany, Carsten Schneider, was critical, saying that “The result is unacceptable. The plant in Zwickau is suffering the most from the cutbacks.” The Social Democratic Party (SPD) politician demanded, “We need clear prospects for Saxony, not lip service.” 250,000 jobs in the East depend on the automotive industry.
The new Saxony state economics minister, Dirk Panter (Social Democrats, SPD), also said that Saxony was suffering “disproportionately” from the cuts contained in VW’s so-called “Future Contract.” Together with Saxony state Premier Michael Kretschmer (Christian Democratic Union, CDU), he wanted to “speak swiftly with the VW board members” at company headquarters in Wolfsburg. “We also want to enter into dialogue with the management of Audi,” Panter continued, “to see whether the brand can step in more due to its history—Audi was founded in Zwickau after all.”
For the workers affected, this is a dead end. It is not a question of distributing the agreed 35,000 job losses “fairly” between east and west Germany, but of preventing them. And this is only possible if workers at the various sites do not allow themselves to be divided and take up the fight together.
It is already the case that the majority of the 35,000 VW jobs that are slated to be cut will be at the western German plants in Emden and Wolfsburg, while the 2,000 employees in Osnabrück face the closure of their plant in 2027.
Playing one location against another is an age-old trick used by the establishment political parties and trade unions to divide workers, limit resistance to fruitless protests and prevent any effective, united struggle. It is the same divide-and-rule strategy that the governing parties are trying to pursue. Region against region, location against location, permanent workers against temporary workers—all this only serves to undermine the resistance of autoworkers.
False hopes
At the same time, a carrot is being held in front of workers’ noses with short and medium-term promises. But all this is nothing more than “dying in instalments,” as one VW worker in Wolfsburg put it recently. Company management, government (federal and state) and trade union are simply passing each other the ball, as they have been doing for decades within the framework of so-called “social partnership.” Whereas the class struggle used to be suppressed primarily through social compromises, today workers are purposefully being demoralised and sold out.
The VW Zwickau-Mosel site is a perfect example of this. Knowing full well that the plant will no longer be able to operate profitably with the few production lines left from 2027, they are using the prospect of recycling and the so-called circular economy as a carrot. Around 1,000 jobs are to be secured by a battery recycling department, which is to be built in Mosel.
The network of automotive suppliers in Saxony, AMZ, even sees “potential for an accelerated transformation process.” The region “must now accelerate in order to allow this small plant that Volkswagen has sown to grow and lead south-west Saxony back to economic success,” said AMZ manager Andreas Wächtler, painting a rosy picture. But every worker knows that when managers talk about “transformation” they are in for uncomfortable times, plant closures and job cuts.
Another carrot is the prospect of a new investor. District Administrator Carsten Michaelis (CDU) brought this up for Zwickau. He said that “unconventional paths” had to be taken and called for “looking for another car manufacturer.”
If Zwickau-Mosel were to be lost, “the entire ecosystem” of suppliers would collapse. Many would have had to reorganise their production in the course of the switch to electric vehicles and in some cases make high investments. They were “up to their necks in water,” said the CDU’s Michaelis. Hopes for Audi were “too vague for him—like a placebo to keep the plant alive.”
A VW spokesperson only said, “There are currently no concrete plans for Chinese investors to join VW Saxony and Zwickau in particular.” There is, however, speculation about the armaments group KNDS Deutschland coming on board. According to business weekly Wirtschaftswoche, the defence company had “its eye on” the VW factories in Zwickau and Salzgitter.
It was only on Wednesday that KNDS finalised the purchase of the former French train maker’s Alstom plant in Görlitz. Of the more than 1,000 who once worked there, around 350 will be able to continue at KNDS. In future, they will build tanks instead of railway carriages. The sell-off of the historic Görlitz plant is a lesson in the “death by instalments” policy that management and the trade union are now pursuing in Zwickau.
Politicians and managers can haggle and haggle over thousands of jobs and the associated sites that are threatened. For the working class, its very existence is at stake.
Zwickau’s automotive traditions
Car manufacturing in Zwickau goes back around 120 years and begins with the founding of the Horch and Audi Group. In 1904, August Horch founded Horchwerke in Zwickau. Following disputes, he left the company and founded Audi Automobilwerke in 1910. Both companies were reunited in Auto Union in 1932 and, alongside DKW and Wanderer, represent two of the four Audi rings.
After World War II, the plants in the east were transferred to the state-owned VEB Sachsenring Automobilwerke Zwickau. The Trabant, so typical of the former East Germany, was built over 3 million times in Zwickau. The traditional car brands Audi and Horch were transferred to Auto Union, which was newly founded in Ingolstadt, Bavaria in 1949, and then taken over by Volkswagen in 1966.
While the old factory site in the centre of Zwickau now mainly serves as the August Horch Museum, a new assembly and drive shaft plant was built in Mosel from 1979 to 1989, from which the current VW site developed. IG Metall already sold out the GKN drive shaft plant in 2023, with the gates being closed in 2026 and production relocated to Hungary. VW’s new moves threaten to put an end to over a hundred years of automotive manufacturing traditions in Zwickau.
To this day, Saxony remains a centre of the automotive industry in Germany’s eastern states. Of the 273 companies located in the east, 44 percent are in Saxony; of the 82,500 employees there, 59 percent are in Saxony. Saxony also accounts for 59 percent of the economic output of the region, which is around €42 billion. The VW plant in Zwickau-Mosel is one of the largest automotive sites by far, alongside the new Tesla plant near Grünheide, outside Berlin.
At the end of January, IG Metall published a detailed study “The automotive industry in eastern Germany—structure, interdependencies, potential,” according to which “one in four industrial jobs in eastern Germany” depends on the automotive industry.
Sustain Consult, a management consulting company commissioned by IG Metall, explains bluntly that West German car manufacturers and suppliers “took over or built new plants” in the former East Germany in order to expand their production capacities under “favourable cost conditions.”
Production was often fragmented into tiny units in order to isolate and weaken the workers. Of the supplier companies in the East, around a third have fewer than 50 employees and around 40 percent of employees work in companies with fewer than 250 workers. However, due to “low vertical integration and dense supplier networks” combined with “limited development and decision-making competence,” even the larger locations such as Mosel always remained interchangeable cogs in the wheel.
As wages slowly rose in eastern Germany following reunification in 1990, car manufacturers continued to relocate to eastern Europe. The study states: “The supply of German car plants by domestic suppliers has become less important in recent years; instead, car manufacturers are increasingly importing from Eastern Europe, while suppliers are exporting more and more. The car plants in eastern Germany are also heavily supplied by other plants of the car manufacturers in question.”
The figures speak for themselves. From 2008 to 2023, the value of all imports of supplier parts has doubled overall. Imports from the new EU member states in Eastern Europe have risen particularly sharply (157 percent) and now account for half of all imports. While turnover in the supplier industry has risen by 25 percent in Germany and 13 percent in Western and Southern Europe since 2008, growth in Eastern Europe has been 154 percent.
For the car companies, the former East Germany was and is little more than a stepping stone in the drive for the even cheaper wages of Eastern Europe. Conversely, this has also served as a lever to push down labour costs in West German locations. All of this happened with the support of IG Metall, which exerts great influence in the automotive industry, in particular as it holds many seats on various company supervisory boards.
Political breeding ground for the far-right AfD
According to the German Confederation of Trade Unions (DGB), almost 60 percent of all employees in the Zwickau region were still on low and poverty wages in 2010, a decade after German reunification. At that time, almost 30 percent of employees received wages and salaries that were below the official poverty wage threshold of 50 percent of the average gross income.
A look at the vagaries of the unemployment rate in Zwickau also shows that being employed does not necessarily protect workers and their families from poverty. Unemployment fell significantly between 2000 and 2020 from 18.5 to 6 percent. However, poverty only fell from 20 to 17 percent in the same period. The introduction of capitalism into the former East Germany from 1990 onwards only meant that a small minority enjoyed the famous “blossoming landscapes” promised by Chancellor Helmut Kohl (CDU).
As the SPD, CDU, Left Party and trade unions supported austerity in equal measure, it is the far-right that has been able to profit from the social crisis that has been ongoing for over 20 years. In 2004, the neo-Nazi German National Party (NPD) entered the Saxony state parliament with 9 percent of the vote and for the first time won a seat on the Zwickau city council. Ten years later, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) took its place.
From 2014 to 2024, the AfD tripled its share of the vote at all levels in the Zwickau constituency from around 10 to 30 percent. In the same period, the Left Party, which emerged from the former Stalinist governing party in East Germany, plummeted from 21 to 3 percent and the SPD from 15 to 6 percent in the last state elections. The Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), an anti-migrant split-off from the Left Party, only partially benefited from this, achieving 15 percent.
The fact that the AfD has nothing to offer automotive workers is most clearly demonstrated by its effusive admiration for Elon Musk. The multibillionaire is currently responsible for implementing massive public sector cutbacks in Donald Trump’s administration and is planning mass redundancies worldwide, including at the Grünheide Tesla plant.
However, Zwickau does not only have fascistic traditions. On the contrary: around 100 years ago, the former workers’ parties—SPD and Communist Party (KPD)—held the majority on Zwickau’s town council.
As industry boomed, the labour movement also grew. Saxony in particular was a cradle of socialist workers’ parties. In 1866, Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel founded the Saxony People’s Party in Chemnitz. This merged with the Social Democratic Labour Party founded in Eisenach in 1869. Today’s right-wing state party, the SPD, no longer has anything to do with these traditions.
Workers must once again take up their own class-struggle traditions and respond to the attacks of the ruling elites with their own counter-offensive.