Volkswagen plans to close at least three German plants and cut thousands of jobs

Volkswagen plans to shut at least three German plants, axe tens of thousands of jobs and slash pay by 10%, Daniela Cavallo, the head of VW’s works council, has told employees. “Management is absolutely serious about all this. This is not sabre-rattling in the collective bargaining round,” Cavallo told several hundreds of employees in Wolfsburg. “This is the plan of Germany’s largest industrial group to start the sell-off in its home country of Germany,” she added, without specifying which plants would be affected or how many of Volkswagen Group’s roughly 300,000 staff in Germany could be laid off. Cavallo said the German government needed to urgently come up with a masterplan for German industry to ensure it does not “go down the drain”.