Volkswagen’s EV Choice Puts Jobs On Line

Volkswagen’s supervisory board meets on Friday to decide whether chief executive Oliver Blume should be given a mandate for the deepest restructuring in the company’s history. The vote matters because the next phase of electric-car production will decide which European plants keep work, and which ones slowly lose it, across at least four EU member states.

Why Blume Has Leverage

The financial pressure is not manufactured. Operating profit fell to €8.9 billion in 2025 from €19.1 billion the year before, while revenue was broadly flat (Volkswagen 2025 results, CNBC). Blume has told managers that overhead costs remain more than 30% above comparable companies (Yahoo Finance).

China has made the squeeze harder. Battery-electric vehicle deliveries there fell 44.3% in 2025 and another 63.8% in the first quarter of 2026 (VW deliveries 2025, VW Q1 2026). For years, China absorbed volume and profit for Europe’s carmakers. It is now sending competition back into the market.

An executive committee made up of the works-council chief, Lower Saxony premier Olaf Lies, and members of the Porsche-Piëch shareholder families meets on Thursday to see whether a deal can be shaped before the full board convenes (Investing.com/Reuters). The list of people in the room explains the problem. This is not a restructuring that can simply be ordered from Wolfsburg.

Volkswagen’s governance divides power between capital, the state, and labour. The Porsche-Piëch families hold 53.3% of voting shares. Lower Saxony, the German state where Wolfsburg is located, holds 20% (VW Annual Report 2025). Workers hold half the supervisory board’s 20 seats through co-determination, the German system that puts employee representatives on the board supervising management. Under a special 1960 law, moving or establishing production sites requires a two-thirds board majority, which means labour and Lower Saxony together can block plant decisions (Gesetze im Internet, NWZ).

A December 2024 agreement already rules out compulsory redundancies at German plants and keeps factories open until 2030 (Correctiv). Blume wants room to go further by keeping plant closures on the table and carving out underperforming divisions. The board can grant or refuse that mandate. It cannot close a factory on Friday.

The Next EV Decides the Jobs

The real restructuring is quieter than a closure vote. It is model allocation: which factory gets the next car, the next platform, and the production ramp that comes with it. That decision fixes years of employment, supplier contracts, and investment.

Czechia appears well placed. Škoda says its Czech factories are running at full capacity, and analysts describe the brand as Volkswagen’s cost champion, able to absorb work that might otherwise sit in more expensive German plants (Newstream, Aktuálně). But Czech suppliers are already reporting order declines of tens of percent (Novinky).

Spain has bought itself time. Martorell has started producing the Cupra Raval and VW ID.Polo after a €3 billion conversion to electric production (Cinco Días). But the works committee says the factory cannot survive beyond 2030 without a second electric platform (El Nacional). That is the model-allocation problem in its simplest form: one car protects a factory for five years, but the next assignment decides what happens after that.

Hungary’s Audi plant in Győr matters because drivetrain allocation connects Volkswagen’s EV shift directly to Hungarian industrial output. Vehicle manufacturing accounts for 26.3% of all manufacturing in the country (KSH). Győr won a €350 million investment last year for a new EV drivetrain programme (Audi MediaCenter).

The closure of Audi Brussels in Belgium showed what happens when a site loses this contest. Unions and governments could negotiate exit terms, but they could not force Volkswagen to allocate a new model to the plant (Trends-Tendances). As we reported, Volkswagen already faces possible multibillion-euro EU CO₂ fines because electric-car sales are too weak. That adds pressure to concentrate EV production in fewer, more efficient plants.

Where the Capacity Goes

German workers have the strongest legal protections and the weakest utilisation, meaning the lowest share of factory capacity actually being used. Reuters-cited projections show German passenger-car plants falling from 81% utilisation in 2026 to 73% by 2030, with Zwickau dropping from 88% to 42% (MarketScreener/Reuters). Central European plants are cheaper and fuller, but their suppliers are already taking the first hit from the downturn. Eurofound finds that since 2022, auto suppliers have announced more job losses than manufacturers themselves (Eurofound).

Friday’s board can give Blume the political mandate to restructure. Workers across four countries will discover their real position only when Volkswagen assigns future EV models, plant by plant, over the months and years ahead. Which factories get those cars remains unsettled, and Volkswagen’s governance ensures every allocation will be fought over before it is agreed.