Autoeuropa to slash staff

A fall in production has led the Volkswagen car plant Autoeuropa to press ahead with a redundancy plan.

In the plan, the car manufacturer is proposing a compensation package of 1.5 salaries for each year of employment, with a maximum ceiling of 10 years. So far 70 employees have accepted amicable redundancy.
The target for the largest car plant in Portugal is to reduce an as yet unspecified number of staff by 2023. The company, based at Palmela, near Lisbon, decided to move forward with the voluntary redundancy plan because of an expected falling production this year (53,000 fewer vehicles than in 2021).
The plant will also not be producing vehicles on Saturdays and Sundays until March. The future of a fourth shift has also been put at risk, and the with it the future of 900 employees.
The plan also envisages shedding an excess of staff which will no longer be needed following the end of production for the Volkswagen Sharan this year, and which involves some 300 employees.
The failure, for now, to secure a new model for the assembly line, is an added pressure for the company’s 5,000 employees.
Employees are being offered two contract termination programmes which have a timeline of 2021-2023, and has already resulted in 70 amicable redundancies since November 2021 when the plan was presented.
At present, Autoeuropa only produces the T-Roc and the Sharan, the latter of which will cease production this summer, and it is against this background that the company has planned the reduction in staff.
“The productivity plan and the end of production of the MPV means drawing up a plan to adjust the number of employees”, states a document that ECO online news was given access to.
But the company stresses the need for measures/programmes that are flexible enough to “allow changes in staff numbers according to production plans and other activities/campaigns related to insourcing and temporary projects”.
Unlike Portugal, where plans for the production of a new model have not been revealed, investment in the Spanish VW plant in the Barcelona region, and in Pamplona to produce three new electric vehicle models, is around €5Bn.