Blume Wants 100,000 Workers Gone. The Bloat He's Refusing to Cut Sits in His Own Offices.

Oliver Blume wants 100,000 jobs gone. Half the model lineup cut. A portfolio of 2,000 investments — including stakes in four German soccer clubs — trimmed, because “the entire automotive industry is under enormous pressure.” When his own supervisory board wouldn’t give him what he wanted, his team’s answer was to threaten to bypass the board entirely and take the plan straight to shareholders.

This is what corporate power looks like when it’s told “no.”

Yes — Volkswagen has genuine problems. U.S. tariffs will cost the company roughly $6 billion a year. Chinese automakers, BYD chief among them, are pouring into Europe. Q2 sales fell 8.6%, driven by collapsing China deliveries. Those are real.

But here is the part Blume won’t say out loud. The company employs more workers per vehicle than its competitors. At Wolfsburg headquarters, four in five of roughly 60,000 employees work in offices rather than on production lines. That’s the real waste — a bureaucracy that has grown fat on German engineering prestige while the world moved on. His plan doesn’t touch that. It touches the people on the line.

And when the supervisory board — which includes ten union representatives and two appointees from Lower Saxony, the German state that holds a 20% voting stake — said no, Blume’s response was to go over their heads. The seven votes in favor came from the Porsche-Piëch family and Qatar’s sovereign-wealth fund. That’s who he wants to speak for Volkswagen: an aristocratic dynasty and a foreign fund, with the workers and the host state cut out of the conversation.

The threat is dressed up as shareholder democracy. It isn’t. Under the so-called “Volkswagen law,” any extraordinary proposal would require 80% shareholder support for the most important decisions — meaning Lower Saxony alone could block it. Blume’s team knows this. The point isn’t to win the vote. The point is to delegitimize the workers’ seat at the table by daring the German political class to use it.

Main Street knows this game. It’s the same playbook American workers have watched for forty years: declare the union obstructionist, demand “flexibility,” threaten to move the plant or shrink the headcount, and when labor refuses to blink, route around them. Blume is running a German version of a very American fight. The 100,000-job-cut target was reported in June and the lineup-halving plan was already on the table in July. The board said no. So now the CEO wants to take it public and let the markets — the same markets that rewarded Volkswagen’s bureaucracy with decades of fat margins — adjudicate who deserves a say in the company’s future.

Daniela Cavallo, the company’s top union representative, put it plain: “Volkswagen is simply not a corporation that operates solely according to capitalist rules. Because of its history, Volkswagen also belongs to us, the employees.” She’s right. Workers packed into a Wolfsburg hall to hear Blume defend his plan held placards reading “Our jobs aren’t your balance-sheet adjustment” and booed his opening pleasantries about valuing communication with staff. Good. They should boo.

Lower Saxony Premier Olaf Lies toured the factories last week and said the obvious: “Lower Saxony is automotive country, and this must remain so.” Right answer to a real problem.

So what should they demand instead?

A counter-plan that fits inside the institutions Germany already has. None of it requires burning the stakeholder model down. All of it requires using it harder.

Cut from the top, not the line. Before any production-side headcount reduction, the supervisory board should require a proportionate cut to management and administrative overhead — the four in five of Wolfsburg’s 60,000 who sit in offices rather than on the floor. Codetermination — the German system that puts workers on the supervisory board — was built precisely so cost decisions wouldn’t be taken by capital alone. It has been working one way for thirty years. Make it work the other way: no production-side cuts until management headcount has been cut at least as much, on a published timeline. That is what the supervisory board exists to enforce.

Expand codetermination to investment decisions, not just operations. The 2,000-investment portfolio — four German soccer clubs and a long tail of holdings nobody pretends is core — should not be off-limits to the workers’ seat at the table. If the works council gets a vote on whether a line in Wolfsburg closes, it should get a vote on whether Volkswagen keeps a stake in VfL Wolfsburg. Right now the answer is decided upstairs. That is the variable the board should be naming.

Works-council veto over plant closures. German codetermination is real on hiring and conditions; it is weaker on the existential questions. Close that gap. The works council should hold a binding veto on plant closures for the duration of any restructuring. That is what stakeholder capitalism is supposed to mean — and what Blume’s version of it, where the stakeholders eat the pain, was never actually doing.

Divest the soccer stakes and selected portfolio into a worker transition fund. Take the four soccer-club holdings and a chunk of the 2,000-investment portfolio and put the proceeds into a transition fund governed jointly by IG Metall and the works councils. The model exists: Mondragon’s Lagun Aro — the inter-cooperative social-security body that relocated roughly 1,700 of the 1,800 Spanish worker-members of Mondragon’s bankrupt Fagor appliance co-op into other co-ops in 2013. When the next restructuring hits, the fund pays for retraining, relocation, and salary continuation. The institutional skeleton already sits inside many large German firms; it just isn’t allowed to be used.

A public EV platform with worker seats. Germany built Volkswagen once as public policy, and Lower Saxony still holds a 20% stake because of that history. That is leverage. Use it. A public option for the EV platform — jointly owned by Lower Saxony, the federal government, and the works councils, with a published codetermination charter — gives Volkswagen a way to scale the next product line without firing the people who would build it. Codetermination isn’t the obstacle to competing with BYD. A management that refused to invest for ten years is. The public stake gets the company the patient capital it now lacks.

A sectoral industrial-policy compact, not a labor-cost cut. The right answer to $6 billion in tariff exposure and a Chinese invasion is a sectoral compact covering product strategy, supply chain, and trade policy — the kind of compact that already exists in pieces across German industry. Sectoral bargaining in Germany covers roughly 80% of workers precisely because the alternative is each firm racing to the bottom. The automotive sector needs the same bargain applied to industrial policy: coordinated investment in next-generation platforms, coordinated supply-chain shifts, coordinated trade response. Labor cost is not the variable to compress. It is the variable that, compressed, kills the domestic market you need to sell to.

None of this is invented this morning. All of it sits inside the German legal toolkit — codetermination, the Lower Saxony stake, the works councils, IG Metall, the Volkswagen law’s blocking-minority mechanism. What the workers’ side lacks is not a model. It is the willingness to use the model hard.

A winning compromise at Friday’s supervisory board meeting looks like this: management-side cuts first, on a published timeline, before any production-side reduction; codetermination extended to the investment portfolio; a binding works-council veto on plant closures for the life of any restructuring; a transition fund seeded by the soccer-stake divestiture, on the Mondragon Lagun Aro model; a public EV option with worker seats, leveraging Lower Saxony’s existing 20%; and a sectoral compact on industrial policy. Six asks. The institution that can deliver all of them already exists.

Blume’s plan is one answer to a hard problem. It is the answer that protects the corner offices and burns the people on the line. The other answer exists. It is institutional, German, and waiting to be used.