Volkswagen will not renew the contracts of its temporary employees at the Zwickau plant

The management of the German firm has decided not to renew the contracts of the one thousand temporary employees who currently work at its Zwickau plant, once these expire at the end of next year, 2025. This decision has been confirmed both by Volkswagen itself and by union sources, following a labor meeting held between both parties. In this way, the rumors that had been circulating since last summer are officially confirmed.

In 2023, more than 2,500 temporary employees worked at the Zwickau plant, whereas today there are one thousand and by early 2026 there will be none left.

In statements to the media, a spokesperson for the German company justified this situation, though not without expressing regret, asserting that the number of orders for the electric models based on the MEB platform that are produced at the Zwickau plant has not increased in recent quarters, nor is it expected to do so in the short or medium term, which is why this is the only possible alternative.

Discontent among Zwickau employees

In any case, everything points to the affected workers being unwilling to accept this situation without further ado and planning to mobilize. To date, they have already written a letter addressed to senior management in Wolfsburg and Saxony, as well as to representatives of the federal and local governments, in which they hold both the management of the Volkswagen Group and German politicians responsible for the fall in demand for the electric models produced in Zwickau.

In the letter, they state that 2024 has been a very hard year for employees, during which what is ultimately going to happen was already being sensed, and they assert that they feel completely abandoned by both the political class and the company’s Board of Directors, they being ultimately the most affected.

It is not the first time, however, that Volkswagen has carried out workforce adjustments. In both 2023 and this same year 2024, the company has allowed many temporary contracts to expire. Although it is also true that, during this period, 700 temporary workers received an offer to end up in a permanent position.

Last summer in Zwickau, some 9,400 people worked there, far exceeding the 6,500 to 7,500 employees the plant had before its exclusive conversion to electric vehicle production, which began with a large wave of hiring in 2019. The sales problems, however, were not foreseeable until 2022, according to the open letter.