Opel willing to cut jobs in Germany

Opel has announced that it will have to cut 750 jobs in the product development area of its technical centre in Rüsselsheim, Germany, as part of a policy aimed at cleaning up the company’s finances, which have been in doubt for some years now.

Of these 750 people, 200 will take up the Opel early retirement programme, while the rest will be moved to another division, possibly the production engineering section. And another 700 jobs at suppliers and ancillary companies of the brand are still at risk of being lost, although they are not on Opel’s payroll; which clearly tells us that the situation at Opel is far from normal.

Although GM, the parent company of Opel, has managed to resolve its own financial problems over the past couple of years, Opel has remained the big question mark for the American company. While some at GM favour selling Opel to the highest bidder, others think the opposite, since many of the best models for GM’s global market, and some for the North American market itself, have come out of the Opel development centre in Rüsselsheim.

What nobody wants is for Opel to become the next Saab, although there are enough weighty reasons to say that Opel is far from reaching such a fateful end.

Source | El Mundo