An ‘earthquake’ at Volkswagen – and a crisis for Germany?
An ‘earthquake’ at Volkswagen – and a crisis for Germany?
The company is seen as crucial not just to local but national wellbeing – and never before have its workers been threatened in their own homeland like this
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Et voilà, this is where the uncritical neoliberalism of the CDU took VW and Germany. Of course they are not going to close the Polish or Hungarian factories, not when they successfully lobbied Orbán's government to effectively abolish overtime pay and restrictions.
I wonder who the folks in Wolfsburg voted for.
I'm not disagreeing, but could you elaborate what's the rough process that took place which you believe led to the present state? Not a German, don't know enough to figure it out myself.
This has nothing to do with Hungary. VW alienated themselves from their core products/customers and started building luxury cars and ditching all the affordable options. This means they were domestically competing against the established luxury brands such as BMW, Mercedes and Audi. Since that's nowhere near a big enough market, they heavily relied on the Chinese market. They also completely fucked up the EV segment. Our minister of economy (?) Habeck predicted in 2019 that exactly this would happen to VW if they didn't bring an affordable EV on the market. Now that China doesn't give a fuck about VW anymore because they have their own luxury cars that also perform better, VW is fucked.
I've started typing up a half page rant, but I kept going on getting sidetracked. With Orbán et al. there is always another blatant theft or scandal that is hard to leave unsaid. Imagine 20 years of Trump, and you get the idea. I'll try to sum it up in short.
With Merkel, basically what happened was that for decades she covered for Orbán stealing EU money and blatantly using a lot of it for propaganda to cement an authoritarian system, in exchange for said system eroding workers' rights and continuously inflating the HUF against the EUR to keep wages down for German firms. Basically, Merkel and Orbán made Hungary into a nearshoring centre for German industry.
And now when the market ebbs for VW, of course they are not going to close the Hungarian factories that they broke the unions in and can basically demand unlimited overtime, and can pay wages in a currency at an all-time weak point against the EUR.
Goddamn. I understand.
Damn, Merkel always seemed like the good guy.