Crisis in the German auto industry: Layoffs, plant closures and insolvencies

Ludwig Weller & Dietmar Gaisenkersting

Not a day passes without grim tidings for workers in the automotive and supplier industries. The major manufacturers have announced large-scale job cuts in the high four- and five-digit range: Volkswagen, Mercedes, Bosch, ZF, Porsche, Ford, Audi and others. At the same time, hundreds of jobs are being lost daily at countless medium-sized companies.

March 2024: 10,000 employees demonstrate in front of the headquarters in Gerlingen near Stuttgart against Bosch's redundancy plans

The IG Metall union has over 2 million members—most of them in the car industry, and through its numerous works council representatives and shop stewards, it is fully informed about every development in the various factories. But instead of mobilising this industrial power against the mass destruction of jobs, it helps enforce these attacks against its own members.

The shelf life of studies on the expected job losses in the automotive and supplier industries is shorter than that of an unstable nuclide. When the German Economic Institute (IW) reported at the beginning of September, on behalf of the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs, that a further 18,000 jobs would be eliminated in Germany by the end of this year and a total of 98,000 by 2030, that forecast had already been overtaken by reality.

Only last week Bosch announced the largest jobs massacre in the company’s history: In Germany alone 22,000 jobs are to go, far in excess of the 9,000 jobs that had been originally slated for elimination.

According to the IW, 1.2 million people currently work for car manufacturers, their suppliers and other dependent companies. In forward-looking transformation areas—electrification, automation and connectivity—only 182,000 people are currently employed. Job creation is stagnating in that sector due to poor sales of German automakers’ EV models. Meanwhile, the corporations are planning a U-turn, refocusing on their gas-powered cars. That may slow the wave of insolvencies and cuts temporarily, but it only means they will then resume the cuts later with even greater force.

The job cuts are being driven by falling profits. On 14 September, finance daily Handelsblatt reported—citing a sector analysis by consultancy EY—that profits at the world’s 19 largest carmakers had fallen by 50 percent in the first half of the year compared with the same period last year (down 49.2 percent) but were still a respectable €42.8 billion.

Leading automaker Porsche has already issued four profit warnings this year, although it still is projected to record profits. Porsche’s market capitalisation has halved since its stock market debut three years ago. That fact has enraged the Porsche and Piëch families, the owners of Porsche.

They want to keep growing their billions at the expense of autoworkers. That is why, like other shareholders and owners, they are demanding the destruction of jobs and further wage cuts to boost profits and sagging share values.

The victims are tens of thousands of workers, as the following incomplete list (with announcement dates) shows:

• Bosch (announced 25 September)—By 2030 at the latest, an additional 13,000 jobs will be cut on top of the 9,000 already announced in the Mobility division, mostly in Germany.
• Stellantis/Opel (25 September)—The Stellantis group is temporarily halting production at several European plants, including Opel’s plant in Eisenach, Thuringia. Production will be “adjusted through a temporary closure on two days in October.”
• Kiekert Heiligenhaus (25 September)—Lockmaker Kiekert AG, inventor of the modern central locking system, has filed for insolvency. The roughly 700 workers in Germany will receive insolvency pay until November; what happens afterwards is unclear.
• Goodyear Fulda (25 September)—On 30 September the Goodyear plant in Fulda will shut down for good after 125 years of industrial history. All 1,050 former employees of the tire manufacturer will by put out on the street.
• ZF Koblenz (19 September)—Supplier ZF announced last week that about 450 jobs will go at Koblenz by 2030. “The bulk of the remaining reductions should be completed by the end of 2026.”
• Stabilus Koblenz (19 September)—The pneumatic spring manufacturer is cutting 450 jobs worldwide and consolidating office and production space in Germany, US, Singapore and Thailand. The measures are to save €19 million by September next year.
• MAN Salzgitter (18 September)—An unspecified number, likely several hundred, of jobs will be eliminated through relocations or closures at the Lower Saxony site. The axle assembly, pipe and crankshaft operations are affected.
• Ford Cologne (16 September)—The Cologne main plant is moving from two shifts to one, with a further 1,000 jobs lost. Just two weeks earlier, IG Metall had pushed through cuts of 2,900 jobs.
• Breyden Lollar (12 September)—The brake disc maker is closing its site in Lollar, Hesse, with 230 employees this year. The foundry workers, once part of the Bosch empire, have feared for their jobs for over three years. Now the end is being targeted within months.
• BorgWarner Darmstadt / Offenbach (8 September)—The US supplier intends to cut nearly half the workforce at Darmstadt and Langen. “According to management, around 40 percent of [300] engineering posts (BTC) and 45 percent of [500] plant jobs are to go by January 2026,” reported IG Metall.
• Musashi Hann. Münden / Lüchow (8 September)—The Japanese supplier plans to cut headcount and close two German plants. Sales of forged parts produced by Musashi have slumped by 40 percent. Plants in Hannoversch Münden (Lower Saxony) and Leinefelde (Thuringia) will close; staff will be cut at Lüchow (Lower Saxony). Hundreds of workers are affected.

IG Metall has made it its business everywhere to push through the attacks and break workers’ will to fight.

The unions are actively working to isolate the affected sites, leaving workers to fight on their own. Union officials negotiate so-called “social contracts” that drive workers out of jobs via early retirement, part-time work for older workers, severance packages and the use of temporary employment companies. Even “compulsory redundancies,” the exclusion of which in the past unions always traded for massive cuts to jobs and wages, are now being implemented.

But workers are willing to fight. The ZF works council in Koblenz reports there was “a readiness to fight for the preservation of jobs.” But, as across the group—which aims to cut up to 14,000 jobs in Germany alone by the end of 2028—the works council and IG Metall refuse to wage common defensive struggles.

When union bureaucrats do respond with feigned anger to the announced attacks, they do so solely to blunt growing militancy. For example, while the IG Metall’s regional secretary in Darmstadt claims the works council and IG Metall will “not accept without protest the plans at BorgWarner,” nothing will happen—beyond a few whistle-and-placard protests or the tired, demoralising ritual of carrying cardboard coffins through the streets. The talk of “opposition” is never followed by concrete, effective resistance.

On the contrary, IG Metall and all the mainstream unions support the corporations’ attacks. Corrupted by lucrative supervisory board seats and works council posts, the bureaucrats share the view of top management and the shareholders: to safeguard profits, jobs must go and personnel costs—i.e., wages, bonuses, extras, sick pay, occupational pensions, etc.—must be cut.

European summits in Copenhagen and US missile threats against Russia increase danger of world war

Johannes Stern

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen greets Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the European Political Community summit, in Copenhagen, Thursday, Oct. 2, 2025. [Photo: Suzanne Plunkett/Pool Photo via AP]

The past two days mark a new high point in the European and transatlantic escalation of war against Russia. On Wednesday and Thursday, two high-level meetings were held in Copenhagen: first the informal gathering of EU heads of state and government, followed by the summit of the European Political Community (EPC) with more than 40 European states.

Both meetings made clear that the European powers are determined to escalate the war against Russia under all circumstances. At the center were the construction of a pan-European “drone wall” against Russia, the use of frozen Russian central bank assets to pay for weapons and ammunition, and even closer military coordination. The meetings were accompanied by Washington’s announcement that it would soon provide Ukraine with long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles—a decision that would mean direct confrontation between the US, NATO and Russia.

At the EPC meeting on Thursday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky appeared in person and spread the central war propaganda: Russia threatens not only Ukraine, but all of Europe.

“If the Russians dare to use drones against Poland or violate the airspace of northern European countries, then it can happen anywhere,” Zelensky warned. In doing so, he echoed the statements of leading European politicians who had seized on the alleged overflight of Russian drones over Denmark and other countries as a pretext to massively expand Europe’s rearmament and preparations for war against Russia.

“Drones in Copenhagen underline how difficult the security situation is,” declared Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo. Europe was engaged in a “hybrid war” with Russia. Latvian Prime Minister Evika Silina made similar comments: “The drones are no longer only flying over Ukraine. Suddenly they are even reaching Denmark.”

Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda warned of “significant gaps” in the detection and defense against drones and demanded massive investments in European air defense. Documents alone, Nausėda said, “do not defend. We need action.”

The host, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, called for a radical acceleration of Europe’s militarization. “I would say that by 2030 we must be able to fully defend ourselves,” she declared. What is meant is the creation of an independent European military power capable of operating both against Russia and independently of the United States.

Frederiksen’s words summed up the agenda of the European governments: they are rearming the continent at breakneck speed. With the permanent stationing of NATO combat troops in Eastern Europe, the preparation of intervention forces in Ukraine, the planned “drone wall” along the eastern flank and the demand to shoot down Russian jets if they violate European airspace, the continent is being step by step driven into a state of war.

Already on Wednesday, the EU heads of state and government reaffirmed the plan for a pan-European “drone wall.” In view of the massive use of drones in the Ukraine war, a common defense line along NATO’s eastern flank is to be built.

Germany is pushing this development particularly aggressively. Inspector General Carsten Breuer announced a few days before the summit that the Bundeswehr would make so-called loitering munitions—kamikaze drones—operational by the end of 2025. “In the end it will have to come down to drones being used against drones,” he said.

The new Inspector of the German Army, Christian Freuding—notorious for his ties to Ukrainian neo-Nazis—also announced an escalation of the drone and air war. “We will once again have an army air defense force,” he declared in his first daily order. Time was of the essence, since “the enemy will not wait for our ‘ready’ message.”

The rhetoric alone underscores that Berlin and Brussels are not concerned with “defense,” but with the active preparation of a full-scale war against the “enemy” Russia. The Kremlin’s reactionary invasion of Ukraine does not change the fact that the NATO powers systematically provoked the conflict. And now their longstanding policy of militarily encircling Russia and supporting Kiev’s war is turning into open war intervention and imperialist plunder.

Another central topic of the summit was the planned use of frozen Russian central bank assets. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz had already called in a Financial Times op-ed a few days earlier for these funds to be used to finance Ukraine. “We must systematically and massively increase the costs of Russia’s aggression,” he wrote.

The EU is thereby carrying out an unprecedented breach of international financial law. Russian reserves worth more than €270 billion were frozen after the start of the war. To now misappropriate them for arms deliveries to Ukraine would not only be a massive escalation against Moscow, but also a signal to all states worldwide: property and reserves are not safe if they conflict with the interests of the imperialist powers.

“We are talking here about plans to illegally confiscate Russian property. In Russian we simply call that theft,” declared Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, threatening consequences.

But this will not stop the European governments. They will use the stolen money to further arm Ukraine to the teeth with tanks, missiles and drones. A current proposal envisages a €140 billion program for weapons and ammunition, partly financed from these funds. “There is a very broad consensus in the European Union to go down this path. Putin should not underestimate our determination,” Merz declared. He expected a decision at the next EU summit in three weeks.

Parallel to the European summits, Washington announced a step that dramatically increases the danger of war: the US will supply Ukraine with Tomahawk cruise missiles. These weapons have a range of up to 2,500 kilometers—enough to strike Moscow or other Russian cities.

Delivering such systems would require direct involvement of US soldiers, as their operation is highly complex. This would cross the line between “indirect support” and direct warfare.

Russia has already made it unmistakably clear: should Ukraine use such weapons to attack Russian territory, Moscow will target military sites in NATO countries. The danger of direct military confrontation and even a devastating nuclear exchange thus increases enormously.

Even now, the imperialist powers are taking military action against Russian ships. French President Emmanuel Macron announced in Copenhagen a coordinated campaign against the so-called Russian “shadow fleet”—tankers transporting Russian oil worldwide despite sanctions.

Last weekend, the French navy detained an oil tanker off its own coast. Two crew members have now been arrested. “This illustrates exactly this policy,” Macron declared. In the coming days, the chiefs of staff of the “coalition of the willing” are to meet to coordinate further measures against the Russian fleet.

Above all, German imperialism is placing itself at the head of the war offensive against Russia, using the escalation to reassert its historic role as Europe’s leading military power. How martial its appearance has become was demonstrated by the presence of the German navy in Copenhagen. The frigate Hamburg, equipped with anti-aircraft systems and reconnaissance technology, secured the summit.

With its current rearmament drive and great-power ambitions, Berlin is directly harking back to the war aims of German imperialism in the First and Second World Wars: domination of Eastern Europe, control over Ukraine, and ultimately the subjugation of Russia.

According to government plans, more than €80 billion in arms spending is planned for the next 15 months alone. The list comprises 154 major projects: new armored vehicles, combat drones, air defense systems, warships and submarines.

Even more gigantic are the medium-term rearmament plans: more than €350 billion are earmarked for armaments over the next 15 years. Taken together, the war credits passed in the Bundesrat with the votes of the Greens and the Left Party amount to over one trillion euros.

The return of Germany and Europe to unrestrained militarism is not merely a megalomaniacal and insane policy. It has deep objective causes. It is an expression of the historic crisis of world capitalism.

On the one hand, geopolitical conflicts are escalating: the US is preparing for confrontation with China, consolidating its dominance in the Middle East, and pushing the European powers to bear the main burden of the war against Russia. On the other hand, both European and US capitalism are mired in deep social and political crisis.

As in the 1930s, with the transfer of power to Hitler and the Nazis, the ruling class on both sides of the Atlantic is responding not with reforms, but with war, rearmament and fascism. In the US, fascist President Donald Trump is mobilizing the military against the growing opposition of the population, while in Germany figures such as Defense Minister Boris Pistorius (SPD) openly speak of the need to make society “fit for war.”

But the very contradictions that are again conjuring up the evils of dictatorship, fascism and world war also create the objective basis to overcome them once and for all through social revolution.

The gigantic sums for rearmament and war are accompanied by brutal cuts in the social sphere, with attacks on wages, pensions and public services. The Copenhagen summits coincided with new protests and strikes in several European countries. On Wednesday, a general strike took place in Greece, and on Thursday hundreds of thousands protested in France against Macron’s austerity and rearmament plans. This is only a foretaste of the coming social explosion.

Imperialist powers tighten the noose around Iran with reimposition of sanctions

Jean Shaoul

The United Nations reimposed sanctions on Iran, September 28—lifted under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—after Britain, France and Germany (the E3) invoked the “snapback” mechanism, accusing Tehran of violating its nuclear obligations under the agreement.

This is the threat to Iran: capitulate to Washington’s diktats, end the nuclear programme and the alliance with Russia and China or face another, far more destructive, military assault. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio described it as “an act of decisive global leadership on the part of France, Germany and the United Kingdom”.

Antonio Guterres, the UN Secretary General, addresses the 80th session of the UNGA at United Nations headquarters at the start of High-Level Week, Monday, Sept. 22, 2025 [AP Photo/Angelina Katsanis]

The JCPOA was jointly signed in 2015 by Iran, the European Union (EU), and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, plus Germany. The first Trump administration unilaterally withdrew from the deal in 2018 and imposed crippling sanctions on Iran, including efforts to block Iranian oil exports, along with secondary sanctions on countries trading with Iran—plunging Iran deeper into economic crisis. This was despite Tehran being fully compliant with the agreement.

While the European powers opposed the US pullout, which impacted on their rising trade with Iran, they did nothing to circumvent US sanctions and de facto aligned themselves with Washington.

Initially Iran continued to abide by the agreement in the hope that the European powers would either find a work-around to the sanctions and/or persuade the Trump administration to rejoin the agreement. Later, citing article 36 of the JCPOA deal stating that any party can treat a violation by another party “as grounds to cease performing its commitments under this JCPOA in whole or in part and/or notify the UN Security Council that it believes the issue constitutes significant non-performance”, it began to enrich its uranium beyond the agreed limit of 3.5 percent to 60 percent purity.

The reimposed UN sanctions include a ban on: any trade and investment related to Tehran’s nuclear and ballistic missiles programme, including an arms embargo and restrictions on ballistic missile production; new foreign investment in Iran’s oil and gas sector; sweeping sanctions on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) which controls much of Iran’s economy via its affiliated companies; asset freezes and visa bans, as well as a complete halt to uranium enrichment and other nuclear activities previously allowed under the JCPOA. In addition, the snapback reimposes an embargo on all weapons transactions with Iran that had expired in 2020.

The 2015 Iran nuclear deal agreement in Vienna. From left to right: Foreign ministers/secretaries of state Wang Yi (China), Laurent Fabius (France), Frank-Walter Steinmeier (Germany), Federica Mogherini (EU), Mohammad Javad Zarif (Iran), Philip Hammond (UK), John Kerry (US) [Photo by Bundesministerium für Europa, Integration und Äusseres - Iran Talks / CC BY 2.0]

These sanctions will pile on the pressure on Iran’s already fragile economy. Protests and demonstrations over unpaid wages, pensions and conditions have been ongoing across the country that has been devastated by years of crippling US sanctions and secondary sanctions, leading to soaring inflation and a precipitous decline in the value of Iran’s currency, with the rial falling to 1,123,000 per US dollar, a record low on the announcement.

There have been frequent planned and unplanned electricity blackouts, while climate change and the government’s chronic mismanagement have depleted groundwater reserves at an alarming pace, with 24 out of 31 provinces experiencing severe water shortages. The government has been forced to designate Wednesdays as public holidays in Tehran and the surrounding areas to reduce energy and water consumption.

Iran is reeling from the impact of the US/Israel’s unprovoked and criminal bombardment in June that targeted its industrial and nuclear facilities and assassinated key politicians, scientists and officials.

The war was launched in pursuit of US imperialism’s aim of controlling the resource-rich Middle East and its geostrategic transportation routes—as a prelude to a broader confrontation with China. It followed Washington’s shifting of Israel from US European Central Command to US Central Command, enabling direct military cooperation with Arab states after the establishment of the Abraham Accords. This spawned a huge expansion of Israel’s export of weapons and intelligence and surveillance tools to the Gulf and has in turn facilitated the flow of these technologies to countries without direct links to Israel.

The US/Israeli bombing followed nearly two years of Israeli attacks on Iran’s regional allies, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Syria and the Houthis in Yemen, severely weakening them, and above all on Hamas and the Palestinians in Gaza. The weapons embargo on Iran is intended to hinder its ability to arm its allies, including Russia which it supplies with drones for the war in Ukraine. The European powers justified the June war, supporting the specious pretext used by Tel Aviv and Washington to justify their attack on Iran: that it must never have a nuclear weapon or pose a threat to the region’s security. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was still monitoring its nuclear facilities to ensure that its nuclear programme was only for civilian purposes and IAEA chief Rafael Grossi acknowledged that it had no evidence that Iran was pursuing weaponisation.

It is Israel, not Iran, that has for decades attacked its neighbours, including the genocidal assault on the Palestinians in Gaza. It is widely acknowledged that Israel has at least 100 nuclear bombs. As one of only five countries not to have signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), its nuclear facilities are not open to inspection by the International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA).

The European powers demanded Tehran capitulate unconditionally to US/Israeli aggression with calls for “de-escalation” and a “diplomatic solution”. Germany, which was particularly incensed by Iran’s support for Russia against Ukraine, led the push for the sanctions alongside Britain and France. Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Europe’s most fervent advocate of war with Russia, stated openly the real attitude of the European politicians when he acknowledged that Israel, by bombing Iran—a country aligned with Russia—“is doing the dirty work for all of us”.

The E3 demanded that Iran agree to resume the duplicitous negotiations with the US, brokered by Oman, underway when the US and Israel attacked Iran in June; grant the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) renewed access to its nuclear facilities halted following the Israel/US war; and provide a full account of the more than 400kg of 60 percent enriched uranium reported by the IAEA.

Tehran made strenuous, last-minute efforts to satisfy the E3’s conditions—despite harsh criticism from Iran’s conservative faction—agreeing to resume cooperation with the IAEA. Iran submitted a series of proposals on a new nuclear accord to Trump’s officials and holding discussions on them on the sidelines of the opening of UN General Assembly that were apparently accepted by French President Emmanuel Macron’s envoy. But the E3, at Washington’s insistence, dismissed them as insufficient. Steve Witkoff, Trump’s Middle East envoy, demanded zero enrichment and the export of its enriched uranium to the US.

The reimposition of sanctions followed the failure of a UN Security Council resolution submitted by Russia and China for a six-month delay to enable further discussions to win a majority. Russia condemned the sanctions, with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accusing the imperialist powers of undermining the Security Council’s authority and pursuing unilateral pressure tactics against Iran.

Russia dismissed the sanctions as invalid and made it clear it would not enforce them. Lavrov said the sanctions “finally exposed the west’s policy of sabotaging the pursuit of constructive solutions in the UN security council, as well as its desire to extract unilateral concessions from Tehran through blackmail and pressure”.

At the same time, the Arab and Muslim states in the region have supported President Donald Trump’s take it or leave ultimatum to Hamas to accept a US takeover of Gaza and their own disarming.

Abbas Araqchi, the Iranian Foreign Minister, said, “The US has betrayed diplomacy, but it is the E3 which have buried it,” telling the Security Council that the snapback was “legally void, politically reckless and procedurally flawed”.

With the resumption of sanctions, the three imperialist powers with veto power on the UN Security Council, including the US, which scuttled the UN-approved nuclear deal with Iran, have veto power over their removal, further strengthening their hand. The reinstatement of sanctions means that Iran is deemed to be in breach of international laws and subject to chapter seven of the UN charter, providing the US with the grounds to declare Iran’s entire nuclear programme illegal and a threat to international peace and legitimizing an attack on the country.

Iran's President-Elect Masoud Pezeshkian speaks during a meeting a day after the presidential election, at the shrine of the late revolutionary founder Ayatollah Khomeini, just outside Tehran, Iran, Saturday, July 6, 2024. [AP Photo/Vahid Salemi]

Iran’s President, Masoud Pezeshkian, speaking in New York after the meeting of the UN General Assembly, called the invocation of the snapback “unjust and illegal. They want to topple us … If you were in our place, what would you do?” He told journalists Iran would decide on retaliatory steps after he returned to Iran and conferred with other officials. “The dream of forcing Iran to its knees is a fantasy and a delusion. We will never yield to such filthy and despicable individuals.”

Iran has accused France, Germany and the UK of abusing the snapback process and recalled its ambassadors to the three countries September 27 for consultations. It has mooted the termination of its 1974 Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement with the IAEA, which sets the parameters for the agency’s access and oversight of nuclear material, while Iran’s hardline faction has called for a withdrawal from the NPT. The Iranian parliament has started drafting a plan to this effect. It has already passed a bill suspending cooperation until the agency guarantees the safety of Iran’s nuclear facilities from further assault.