#ig-metall

#ig-metall

Renault plans to reduce its number of engineers by 15 to 20% in the coming two years, meaning up to 2,400 of the current 11,000 to 12,000 engineers worldwide would have to leave the company.

The trial, which began in Munich in February, sees two former Development Board chairs and two leading engineers facing charges for their alleged role in the massive environmental and business scandal that first made global headlines over a decade ago.

Unfortunately it was not enough to secure a majority we will continue to do our utmost in the new works council to bring about change for us and our colleagues at the gigafactory. The unusually heated battle had pitted the carmaker's management against the union and was marked by lawsuits and mutual accusations of slander.

"The start of the year has been extremely sluggish for German industry," said Elmar Voelker, an analyst at the bank LBBW, noting that "the fleeting hopes of a recovery that had emerged last autumn have evaporated for now."

In 2025, German car companies earned nearly 44% less than in 2024, with earnings before interest and taxes dropping to just 24.9 billion, the lowest since 2020.

Germans enjoy some of the most generous employee illness policies in Europe, a fact which the conservative chancellor, Friedrich Merz, says is undermining efforts to kickstart the EU's biggest economy whose growth has largely stalled since 2022. At a regional campaign event last weekend, Merz said staff took an average 14.5 sick days per year too high, he said. That's nearly three weeks in which people in Germany don't work due to illness, he said.

"In the era of great powers, our freedom is no longer a given. It is under threat," said German Chancellor Friedrich Merz at the opening of the Munich Security Conference earlier in February. Merz explicitly mentioned China. "China has the ambition to shape global affairs, laying the foundations for this over many years with strategic patience. In the foreseeable future, Beijing could draw level with the US in terms of military might. China is systematically exploiting the dependencies of others, reinterpreting the international order on its own terms," he said.

The head of the union, Andreas Pinheiro, said he expects around 300 flight cancellations per day, compared with what Lufthansa said were 800 flight cancellations during the previous walkout on February 12.

MAN Truck & Bus SE has formalized a long-term restructuring and investment framework with its works council and IG Metall, positioning the manufacturer for what it describes as sustained competitiveness amid structural shifts in the commercial vehicle industry. The agreement, laid out in a jointly adopted key issues paper, defines the industrial, financial and workforce parameters of the "MAN2030+" program.

People still want children, and the question is why are they not having them? A sense of security is essential for realizing the desire to have children. The succession of crises has prevented many people from turning that wish into reality.

Many bus, trams and underground services in Germany will not be operating on Monday amid a nationwide strike by the trade union Verdi. Millions of employees and schoolchildren who rely on public transport will be forced to find alternative methods of getting to work or school, with wintry weather conditions adding to their problems. All 16 German states bar one, Lower Saxony, where employees have agreed not to strike for now, are to be initially affected by the industrial action, Verdi said.

It is an act that has shocked Germany: a Deutsche Bahn employee checked the ticket of a man traveling alone on a regional train, who turned out not to have a valid ticket. When the train conductor asked him to leave the train at the next stop, he was attacked and punched repeatedly. The train conductor lost consciousness, had to be resuscitated, and died a day later in a hospital from a brain hemorrhage as a result of blunt force trauma.