• " Personnel costs are not the cause of the problems facing VW, Daimler or BMW, nor of Conti, Bosch or ZF. (IG Metall chief negotiator Thorsten Gröger, 28.10.2024, ZDF) Therefore, there is no reason to cut wages in the automotive and supplier industries. However, IG Metall has every reason to defend workers' incomes and social rights! In the first three quarters of 2024, the big three – VW, Mercedes and BMW – achieved profits of around 20 billion euros. The crisis is being talked up to stoke fears and implement social cuts. It is incomprehensible that IG Metall nevertheless declared: "We are ready to make a contribution." ... " From the lead article "Who owns the factories? You own the factories!" in the "Action Newspaper – for a transport industry with a future" No. 1 from March 2025, which also calls on IG Metall to resist instead of pursuing social partnership – see further cross-manufacturer appeals from the automotive industry:
  • No strikes on a burning planet: Gerd Rathgeb on a blind spot in trade union resistance in the automotive industry New
    "... Employees in the automotive industry should slowly realize that we can no longer continue with the mobility policy of recent decades – and even less so with actions such as the car parades, which took place on one of the hottest days of the year through the Stuttgart city centre with combustion engine vehicles. Not continuing as before means realizing that the future lies in fewer cars, not more, and that these should run exclusively on electric motors and renewable energy, and on roads with speed limits: from the motorway via federal and state roads into cities. This would simultaneously require that in factory halls that may soon be empty – as is foreseeable for Neckarsulm, for example – buses, trains or electric vehicles for people with mobility impairments are built instead of ostentatious passenger cars. (...) These would be topics that must be on the agenda during all protests, without neglecting, as already said, demands for job security, wage increases and humane working hours, or the issue of managerial failure. Social arguments necessarily include ecological ones, otherwise we remain stuck in yesterday… " Article by Gerd Rathgeb  in express – Newspaper for socialist workplace and trade union work – Issue 10/2026. See background:
  • Under the slogan "A future instead of sweeping cuts", around 175,000 workers in the automotive industry protested on September 21 at 280 locations – not all for the same goals
  • Under pressure from the base. IG Metall mobilizes for the action day for employees in the auto industry. More important than this itself is who will determine the course afterwards
    "For the coming Monday, IG Metall calls on employees of the automotive and supplier industries to take action; five days later, the German Trade Union Confederation (DGB) calls for nationwide protest actions against social cuts in 15 cities. Appeals speak of an "unprecedented attack" on employment and "excessive fixation on returns," even of a "class struggle from above." However, radicality ends where it would need to become practical: industrial action and strikes are not mentioned in either mobilization. Neither is the accelerated shift to a war economy and its causal connection with the social cuts being opposed.
    The DGB slogan for May 1st was "First our jobs, then your profits": Profits may remain as long as jobs are secured. Now comes the bill. Entrepreneurs and the government attack jobs, working hours, collective agreement standards, and the welfare state. The balance sheet of the "social partnership" negotiation logic is devastating: The union apparatus accepts collective bargaining concessions in exchange for promises to preserve jobs and invest; companies still have control over both. When the next profit target comes up, that will be at stake again. IG Metall itself speaks of "sacrifices worth several billion euros" – and at the same time declares its willingness to cut costs. Basically, only the apparatus holds on to "social partnership" anymore. (…)
    IG Metall admits that pressure on this strategy is now growing. At the press conference for the auto action day on September 21, it was said that due to the "pressure from the base," they could not wait until the end of the obligation to refrain from industrial action: The apparatus mobilizes because the base is pushing. The question is whether this pressure will be channeled back into negotiations – or whether independent action power emerges from the mobilization itself. (…)
    The organizational power of the unions must be claimed from below: go out, mobilize, connect workplaces, turn protest into resistance and action into strike capability. If the leadership returns after the action days to the "social partnership" negotiation routine with capital and state, employees still have the possibility to act independently of the leadership's authorization. What matters is not the speeches on the stages, but what begins in the workplaces from September 22    ." Article by Andreas Buderus in junge Welt on 17.09.2026 external link with memories of 1973. See
  • Revisited: Resistance Without Limits. Letter from Wolfgang Schaumberg dated February 17, 2002
    "… What gives me a little more hope again is a comment in the business newspaper "Frankfurter Allgemeine" (FAZ) of January 17, 2002, which analyzed as the central problem of Opel management: the old, hard-won works agreements must go. "The art is," writes the commentator, "to weaken contracts so that they bring the right relief (for Opel), but do not lead to a revolt!" With brutal openness, the FAZ writer continues: "Probably Forster should have seized the early opportunity shortly after taking office and closed a plant, Antwerp, which would have meant the least resistance. Or, if one calculates it ruthlessly, Bochum. But who dares to take on Bochum in view of the particularly combative workforce there? Especially when one considers that through the networking of production only around 500 striking employees in Bochum are needed to bring the entire production in Europe to a standstill."…" Documentation of Wolfgang Schaumberg's contribution  in express – newspaper for socialist workplace and trade union work issue 9/2026 – it is a reprint of Wolfgang Schaumberg's contribution "My Opinion" in Resistance Without Limits – GoG Info No. 17 from February 2002 (in the LabourNet Archive) (The GoG was a party-independent group at GM/Opel Bochum, see e.g.: Dossier: [Video with and about the GoG] Film project on the resistance of the workforce at Opel in Bochum)