Volkswagen Group CEO Oliver Blume is reportedly pushing to cut as many as 100,000 jobs across the automaker’s German workforce and close as many as four assembly plants, a plan he presented directly to employees at a tense town hall in Wolfsburg on August 25, 2026, according to Bloomberg reporting.
The number is not entirely new. Volkswagen and labor representatives had already agreed to eliminate 50,000 positions across the VW, Audi, Porsche and CARIAD divisions by 2030. Blume is now said to be pressing for an additional 50,000 cuts on top of that pact, which would bring the total to roughly 100,000. Union officials briefed on the talks say the real figure could climb even higher, warning it may reach 140,000 once jobs tied to shuttered plants are counted, according to Automotive World’s account of the labor talks.
Four Plants Without a Future
The plants under the sharpest scrutiny are the Hanover van factory, the Zwickau EV plant, the Emden facility and Audi’s Neckarsulm site, which together employ more than 45,000 workers. In an internal memo detailed by Automotive World, Blume stopped short of confirming closures but acknowledged the sites currently lack a defined role: “As of today, we still cannot confirm competitive use cases for the plants” beyond 2030, he wrote. He described the larger 50,000-job figure as a “theoretical deduction” based on VW’s estimated 20% cost disadvantage against European rivals, rather than a finalized decision.
Workers Confront the CEO
More than 10,000 employees packed the grounds outside Volkswagen’s Wolfsburg headquarters on August 25 as Blume laid out the plan, booing and jeering him through parts of the presentation, according to autoevolution’s coverage of the event. Works council chief Daniela Cavallo told the crowd that trust in the executive board had been damaged and demanded management guarantee “clear future job prospects for workers at every German plant.” IG Metall union leader Christiane Benner was blunter still, dismissing Blume’s target of a 9% operating margin as “cloud cuckoo land” given the company’s current 4.2% margin, and local unionists have raised the possibility of strikes if the cuts aren’t scaled back.
The Numbers Behind the Squeeze
Blume has told staff Volkswagen’s overhead costs run roughly 30% above comparable automakers and that the group cannot sustain its future on a margin below 4%. Beyond the layoffs, the restructuring blueprint calls for stripping out more than €10 billion in overhead, thinning management ranks, cutting model and equipment variants, and slicing another 500,000 vehicles from Volkswagen’s annual European production capacity as it revises a plan that once targeted 9 million units a year down toward roughly 8.5 million. The company has also trimmed its five-year investment budget by about 15%, to roughly €130 billion.
No final decision on the plant closures has been announced, and Blume’s memo indicates the specifics are still being worked out. Given Volkswagen’s labor structure, in which unions hold significant sway over the supervisory board, the fight over which factories survive is expected to be negotiated publicly, plant by plant, in the weeks ahead.