Volkswagen Will Cut 100,000 Jobs by 2030. That Is Roughly One in Seven Workers.

Volkswagen said this week that it will eliminate 100,000 jobs by the end of 2030, about 15% of its global workforce and the largest restructuring the automobile industry has ever attempted. The figure combines 50,000 cuts newly approved by the company's supervisory board with 50,000 that had already been agreed in earlier rounds. For comparison, General Motors shed roughly 50,000 positions during its 2009 bankruptcy.

"The supervisory board has unanimously approved the executive board's future plan presented today," chief executive Oliver Blume said. "This is a strong signal for the future of the Volkswagen Group." The company framed the decision as a need to systematically align workforce levels with economic realities.

Those realities are three at once. American tariffs have raised the cost of selling European-built cars into the United States. Electric vehicle demand in Europe has come in far below the volumes Volkswagen built capacity for. And Chinese manufacturers have taken share both at home, where Volkswagen was for decades the dominant foreign brand, and increasingly in Europe itself.

Four German plants are named as at risk: Hannover, Emden, Zwickau and Neckarsulm. Zwickau, in Saxony, was converted at enormous expense into an electric-only site and became the symbol of the company's EV pivot. Emden was rebuilt for the same purpose. None of the four has been formally approved for closure, but shutting any of them would be the first time Volkswagen has closed a full-scale factory in Germany in its history.

The unions did not stop the plan. IG Metall representatives on the board, including Christiane Benner and Daniela Cavallo, said in a joint statement that "workers' representatives have once again taken responsibility and prevented a dangerous escalation of the conflict." That is a long way from where the union started. Labor leaders had earlier dismissed management's proposals as "nonsense, rubbish, hogwash," objecting mainly to how little the company was willing to show them about its numbers.

Volkswagen employs a substantial share of the industrial workforce in Lower Saxony, which holds a stake in the company and a seat at the table, and the state's political leadership has resisted closures for years. A cut on this scale reaches beyond the company's own payroll into the supplier network that surrounds each plant, where the employment multiplier is several times larger than the headline number.

What the plan does not settle is whether the shrinking stops at 2030. The company has committed to the target without committing to which sites absorb it, which leaves four German towns waiting to find out.