Frankfurt am Main – Since Wednesday, a total of 500,000 workers from nearly 280 companies in the metal and electrical industries across Germany have brought production to a standstill with full-day warning strikes. Today alone, production lines are at a standstill at 97 companies employing around 304,000 workers, IG Metall announced on Friday. Today’s strikes are concentrated in the automotive, aerospace, and shipbuilding industries. Some of the first walkouts began as early as Thursday evening with the start of the night shifts.
“The tremendous turnout for the full-day warning strikes shows that workers—members and non-members alike—stand behind our demands and are ready to fight for them with all their might,” said Jörg Hofmann, President of IG Metall, on Friday in Frankfurt. “Now it’s up to the employers to understand this signal and step up their efforts significantly. If the employers show this willingness, negotiations can resume on Monday.”
Together with the 960,000 metalworkers who briefly walked off the job since the end of the peace obligation, a total of around 1.5 million workers nationwide have demonstrated for their collective bargaining demands to date.
In addition, more than 56,000 workers at Volkswagen’s sites in Wolfsburg, Salzgitter, Braunschweig, Kassel, Emden, and Hanover temporarily walked off the job yesterday, thereby impressively underscoring their demand for an improvement to the VW in-house collective bargaining agreement.
Today, around 120,000 workers at 22 plants in Baden-Württemberg are walking off the job for full-day warning strikes. Among the sites affected are Porsche in Stuttgart-Zuffenhausen and the Daimler plants in Stuttgart and Sindelfingen. In Sindelfingen, Jörg Hofmann, President of IG Metall, addressed the warning strikers; at the Daimler plant in Gaggenau, Irene Schulz, Executive Board Member of IG Metall, will speak to the warning strikers this evening.
In Bavaria , approximately 80,000 employees at 17 plants have brought production to a standstill. A total of 36,500 employees at the five BMW plants, 31,000 at Audi, and 9,000 at Schaeffler and SKF have walked off the job. Contract logistics providers are also participating in the full-day warning strikes. In Ingolstadt, Jürgen Kerner, executive board member of IG Metall, addressed the warning strikers at Audi.
Around 30,000 workers from 14 plants are on strike in the IG Metall “Küste” district. The main sectors in this district are the aviation industry and shipyards. The strikes are affecting Airbus plants in Hamburg, Bremen, and Lower Saxony, as well as suppliers. At the Airbus plant in Bremen, Christiane Benner, Second Chair of IG Metall, addressed the warning strikers. Work has also been suspended at the TKMS shipyard in Kiel, the Neptun shipyard in Rostock, and the Meyer Werft shipyard in Papenburg.
In the Central District ( Hesse, Rhineland-Palatinate, Saarland, and Thuringia), production has come to a halt at 13 plants employing 30,000 workers. Wolfgang Lemb, Executive Board Member of IG Metall, addressed the warning strikers at a rally in Germersheim in front of the Daimler GLC plant and in Wörth at the Daimler truck plant. Hans-Jürgen Urban, executive board member of IG Metall, addressed Opel workers in Kaiserslautern.
About 21,000 workers at 16 plants in North Rhine-Westphalia have walked off the job for full-day warning strikes. The main areas affected are Krefeld, Lohmar, and the Gummersbach region. At three plants in each of these areas, production has been halted for the entire day. The largest plant affected by the strike, with 6,700 employees, is the Daimler plant in Düsseldorf.
More than 20,000 workers from 11 plants in the IG Metall Berlin-Brandenburg-Saxony district have halted production for the entire day . Among the plants affected by the strike in Berlin are the Daimler plant, the BMW plant, and the Schnellecke Module and Supplier Center. In Berlin, Irene Schulz, executive board member of IG Metall, addressed the workers at Daimler and BMW. In Saxony, production has come to a halt at the Porsche plant in Leipzig, Volkswagen in Dresden, BMW in Leipzig, and Schnellecke Logistics in Glauchau, among others.
In the Lower Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt district, more than 2,800 employees at four plants walked off the job, including MAN Truck & Bus in Salzgitter and Nexans in Bramsche.
