VW Brand Will Trim as Many as 4,000 Jobs Amid Digital Overhaul

Volkswagen’s main car brand will let lapse as many as 4,000 general and administrative jobs while adding at least 2,000 IT positions over the next four years, according to Bloomberg. The company will avoid layoffs at its German factories as it negotiates a major shift toward electrification and self-driving cars.

The move, brokered with VW’s powerful unions, includes job guarantees through 2029, the manufacturer said in a statement. The brand will rely on partial retirement and attrition to help reach targeted staff reductions as it culls models and focuses on new technologies that require fewer factory workers.

With earlier job cuts, VW is on track with a plan announced in March to improve profit by 5.9 billion euros a year, the unit’s chief operating officer, Ralf Brandstaetter, said in the statement. “We are making the company fit for the digital age in a sustainable way.“

The prospect of deeper cutbacks had alarmed VW’s union leaders as manufacturers wrestle with the transformation of sprawling industrial operations. App-based services like ride-sharing and car-sharing are already threatening the industry’s traditional business model of individual car ownership and electric cars require fewer parts and workers for assembly.

The VW car brand, which accounts for about half the group’s global deliveries, employs roughly 110,000 workers in Germany out of a global workforce of 663,000 across the Volkswagen group, the world’s largest automaker. The unit has been pushing to rein in bloated expenses to lift profitability that’s trailing rivals.

VW will start producing the first model of its all-electric ID. car range toward the end of this year, with an eventual goal of more than 20 vehicles based on the same architecture. It intends to sell at least 1 million purely battery-powered vehicles by 2025. It will start producing the ID. 3 hatchback at its German factory in Zwickau later this year.