If anyone needed further evidence of how four years of the ‘Bush Doctrine’ have poisoned the relations between US and Germany, they only have to look at the acrimony surrounding General Motor’s plan to shift production from its German facilities to Poland. Last week the Opel workers in Bochum ended their wildcat strike, but that did not end the dispute. If anything, the tone has become even more bitter and the anger at GM has now taken on a stridently political tone that is directed at Bush’s foreign policy. Mark Landler has an article in the New York Times, “Resentment Toward G.M. Is Growing in Germany”.
“Is General Motors jilting Germany for Poland because of the war in Iraq?
A German politician suggested as much last week, saying in a radio interview that G.M.’s Opel division had shifted some auto production from its plants in Germany to a factory in Gliwice, Poland, to reward the Polish government for its support of the Bush administration.
G.M. dismisses political motives, noting that Poland’s far lower labor costs give it a compelling economic incentive to move. But this is only one of several brickbats General Motors has had to absorb in the 11 days since it announced that it would cut up to 12,000 jobs in Europe, the majority in Germany.”
General Motors may have perfectly legitimate business reason to scale back Opel production in Germany, but the unbelievably incompent and arroagant way this restructuring has been been carried out parallels the aggressive ‘unilateralism’ of the Bush administration.
“Rather than thrashing out its cuts in advance with Opel’s union and workers’ councils, as is the custom in German companies, G.M. announced them directly to the employees and the news media.
The company further rankled workers by not dispatching an executive to the Opel factory in Bochum to explain its decision. The factory, in the economically depressed Ruhr Valley, is viewed as the most likely to be shut down. Workers there staged a six-day strike to protest the cuts.
“I don’t think they know anything about Europe, otherwise they would have done things completely differently,” said Ferdinand Dudenhöffer , director of the Center for Automotive Research in Gelsenkirchen. “I’ve never seen such lousy communication at such a difficult moment.”
Now the German workers at Opel have signaled that they are prepared to strike if GM doesn’t consider an alternate proposal that would preserve jobs and plant capacity in Germany. Separately, the Netzeitung reports that several Opel employees are considering filing a ‘multi-billion’ dollar lawsuit against GM, charging that it systematically ‘plundered’ the company’s resources over many years:
Der deutschen Tochter sei durch das Vorgehen von GM ein Schaden in Milliardenhöhe entstanden. Als Beispiel nannte der frühere Betriebsratschef unter anderem die überhöhten Preise für Komponenten, die an Opel geliefert wurden. Dagegen hätte GM von dem deutschen Know-How profitiert: Das Entwicklungszentrum in Rüsselheim habe eigenes Know-How an andere Konzerntöchter «für’n Appel und’n Ei» abgeben müssen.
Politics and business eventully intersect. It is apparent that repairing the rift that has developed between Germany and the US of the past four years will require a concerted effort not just from politicians, but also business leaders.
