Volkswagen Lines Up the Biggest Job Cuts in Its History

Volkswagen is preparing what would be the deepest cut in its 89-year history: up to 100,000 jobs eliminated worldwide and the end of car production at four German plants, according to a report this week in the business magazine manager magazin. The company declined to confirm the plan, but the scale alone has reopened a fight that German industry hoped it had settled.

The number amounts to roughly one in six of the group's 657,000 employees. It would double the retrenchment Volkswagen described only months ago, when management spoke of removing around 50,000 posts by the end of the decade. According to the report, chief executive Oliver Blume and finance chief Arno Antlitz also want to cut planned investment by about 15 percent, to just over €130 billion over the next five years, and to break the group into more independent parts — spinning off the core VW passenger-car brand and its components operations.

A promise barely 18 months old

If confirmed, the plan would collide head-on with a deal struck in December 2024. After the threat of the first plant closures in Volkswagen's German history, the company and the IG Metall union agreed to remove about 35,000 jobs through attrition and early retirement, alongside billions of euros in wage concessions. In return, management promised no compulsory redundancies and no German plant closures until 2030.

That promise is what is now in question. The four sites named in the report — Volkswagen's factories in Hanover, Zwickau and Emden, and the Audi plant in Neckarsulm — would not all close at once, but their car assembly would be wound down.

Labour leaders reacted with open defiance. In a joint statement, works-council chair Daniela Cavallo and IG Metall president Christiane Benner warned the company against tearing up the agreement.

"If these plans come to fruition we would stop them with all our might."

The numbers behind the alarm

Behind the proposal lies a balance sheet under strain. In the first quarter of 2026, Volkswagen's net profit fell 28 percent to €1.56 billion, while revenue slipped 2 percent to €75.7 billion. The group's troubles are concentrated where its ambitions once were: in China, its single most important market, sales dropped about 20 percent as domestic electric-vehicle makers took ground Volkswagen long considered its own.

The pressure is compounded from the other side of the Atlantic. American tariffs are costing the group roughly €4 billion a year, eroding the margins on every car it ships across the ocean. Antlitz had already told staff the existing savings would not be enough.

"The cost savings planned so far are not enough. If we fail to do this, we are putting our future at risk."

A test for the German model

Few companies carry as much symbolic weight as Volkswagen. The state of Lower Saxony holds a blocking stake; its plants anchor whole towns; its system of co-determination has long been held up as proof that Germany could modernise without mass dismissals. A cut on this scale would test that proposition as never before, and it would land in the middle of a wider European argument about whether the continent's carmakers can survive the shift to electric vehicles and Chinese competition at the same time.

The shock would not stop at Volkswagen's gates. Tens of thousands of supplier jobs across Germany and beyond hang on its assembly lines, and a retreat of this size would feed a wider European anxiety about deindustrialisation — the sense that the continent's manufacturers are being squeezed between cheaper Chinese rivals and a less hospitable American market at the very moment they are asked to finance the costly switch to electric cars.

• Up to 100,000 jobs, against a worldwide workforce of about 657,000.
• Four German plants facing the end of car assembly: Hanover, Zwickau, Emden and Audi's Neckarsulm.
• Investment to fall about 15 percent, to just over €130 billion over five years.

For now, Volkswagen insists nothing is decided. "We will not pre-empt this process," the company said, adding that the relevant facts "will be discussed and approved by the relevant bodies." The discussion it is trying to defer, however, has already begun — on factory floors from Lower Saxony to Saxony, and in a German political class that has staked much on the idea that its industrial heartland can adapt without being hollowed out.