Jostling for position

The talks in Ruesselsheim, Germany will focus on four key elements about the "New Opel," which includes Britain's Vauxhall. These are: its industrial concept, the redistribution of production, the reorganization of the individual plants, and the phase-out of jobs.

One of the conditions still remaining for GM to sign a deal to sell a 55 percent stake in Opel/Vauxhall to the Canadian auto-parts supplier Magna and its Russian partner, Sberbank, is a pledge by labor to contribute to annual cost savings worth some 265 million euros ($388 million).

Local union leaders at Opel's eight European plants, however, are concerned about how many workers they each may have to give up to ensure the survival of other sites.

Two German plants affected

Over the weekend, Germany's Welt am Sonntag newspaper reported that two plants in Germany would have to give up jobs.

Of the roughly 4,500 positions to be cut in Germany, the paper said, Opel's home base in Ruesselsheim was slated to lose 1,817 jobs with the plant in Bochum losing as many as 2,045 jobs. Bochum could also lose the assembly of the Astra compact car as well as transmission production. Kaiserslautern is set to lose 283 jobs.

Apparently, no cuts are planned at the Eisenach factory in eastern Germany, where some of Opel's Spanish production will be moved. A total of some 10,500 jobs will be cut across Europe.

Protests against possible plant closures have been staged in Spain, Britain and Belgium. At the latest rally on Sunday, Sept. 20, 15,000 people demonstrated in Zaragoza, Spain, to keep the 7,000 jobs at the Opel factory in nearby Figueruelas. Workers there have threatened massive strikes if large-scale job cuts are made at the plant.

Opel's Belgian plant in Antwerp is in danger of being shuttered altogether because General Motors now looks set to build two subcompact crossovers in China instead of Antwerp as originally promised.

"We looked at it in detail, but it just didn't make sense based on our own internal analysis," said GM CEO Fritz Henderson on the sidelines of the Frankfurt Auto Show.

Efficiency metrics, like the cost per vehicle, did not show that Antwerp was better than Bochum, he said, refuting speculation that the European Union might block the Magna deal because closing the Belgian site when Bochum was less productive was against EU internal market rules.

"Bochum's production is 200 euros cheaper per car than in Antwerp," said Bochum union leader Rainer Einenkel on Friday.

Opel needs a European solution

Opel's German works council boss, Klaus Franz, said that it was important to find a European solution. "Production volumes and the other burdens to be shouldered need to be fairly divided among the European plants," he said.

But, at the same time, Franz rejected the figures mentioned so far for the Opel factories in Germany. "This is about jobs and every job has a face," he said.

Franz also denied that the state aid offered to Opel by the German government was an unfair subsidy. He said that the 1.5 billion euros in guarantees did not only benefit Opel's German sites, as the lay-off plans for Bochum and Ruesselsheim illustrated. He emphasized that without that money the other European plants would not have survived and Opel would have gone into bankruptcy along with GM.

Earlier, Britain's Business Secretary, Peter Mandelson, had warned of a "subsidy war" and said the European Commission should "refuse to accept plant closures and restructuring that reflect the size of the checkbook, rather than commercial considerations."

gb/dpa/ap/afp/Reuters

Editor: Jennifer Abramsohn