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Audi to Cut 9,500 Jobs to Fund Shift to Electric Vehicles

10 points by reddotX 7y ago

olliej 7y ago
Is the money saved by axing that many employees really going to be greater than hiring replacements for EV development? This is a serious question: they say that they’re going to “create 2000 new jobs”, which just seems to be an attempt to distract from them firing 7500 people and then either resetting benefits or replacing higher paid older workers with lower paid new grads. How much of a pay cut are the executive branches taking to free up money for investing in the future - after all that would simply be investing a short term pay cut for more money in the long term.
- serf 7y ago
  > Is the money saved by axing that many employees really going to be greater than hiring replacements for EV development? Yes. My prediction : They will act like any other automotive group. They will fire a bunch of experienced (read: overpaid) workers, hire interns from local colleges for dirt cheap, promise them the world in advancement, abuse them until 90 percent of them leave for greener pastures, continue abusing the remaining 10 percent until the next market initiative 'forces' you to 'cut jobs' so that you can 'shift to electric', that way you remain the good guy (we're evolving to save the world!), while achieving whatever business stratagems actually prompted the move. Now is a prime time to do this kind of thing, the colleges are going to be filled to the brim with students who are eyeballing EV technologies. It's pretty win-win (for the unfired). Really, it's just a hidden factory re-basing strategy, and it's employed all over aerospace, too. It'll probably happen again whenever there is some huge technology leap , legislative change, or social consensus.
  - olliej 7y ago
    "overpaid" is up for debate - highly paid is the appropriate: if you have a system that is giving people raises that exceed their capability you're screwing up. But my question was more in the direction of a net 7500 people fired: what were they doing? Are they really only useful for ICEs? Audi has ~91k employees, ~14k of which are in R&D. Where did those 7500 come from? Was half of R&D ICE specific? Or is it from many areas? If this is really about designing for the future it seems like the employees that they wanted to replace would be in R&D. The other question is what were they doing with those 7500 employees that was not actually necessary? Or is this just a case of giving ~8% more work to the remaining employees without paying more? Honestly I suspect the latter

10 points by reddotX 7y ago

Is the money saved by axing that many employees really going to be greater than hiring replacements for EV development? This is a serious question: they say that they’re going to “create 2000 new jobs”, which just seems to be an attempt to distract from them firing 7500 people and then either resetting benefits or replacing higher paid older workers with lower paid new grads. How much of a pay cut are the executive branches taking to free up money for investing in the future - after all that would simply be investing a short term pay cut for more money in the long term.

serf 7y ago
> Is the money saved by axing that many employees really going to be greater than hiring replacements for EV development? Yes. My prediction : They will act like any other automotive group. They will fire a bunch of experienced (read: overpaid) workers, hire interns from local colleges for dirt cheap, promise them the world in advancement, abuse them until 90 percent of them leave for greener pastures, continue abusing the remaining 10 percent until the next market initiative 'forces' you to 'cut jobs' so that you can 'shift to electric', that way you remain the good guy (we're evolving to save the world!), while achieving whatever business stratagems actually prompted the move. Now is a prime time to do this kind of thing, the colleges are going to be filled to the brim with students who are eyeballing EV technologies. It's pretty win-win (for the unfired). Really, it's just a hidden factory re-basing strategy, and it's employed all over aerospace, too. It'll probably happen again whenever there is some huge technology leap , legislative change, or social consensus.
- olliej 7y ago
  "overpaid" is up for debate - highly paid is the appropriate: if you have a system that is giving people raises that exceed their capability you're screwing up. But my question was more in the direction of a net 7500 people fired: what were they doing? Are they really only useful for ICEs? Audi has ~91k employees, ~14k of which are in R&D. Where did those 7500 come from? Was half of R&D ICE specific? Or is it from many areas? If this is really about designing for the future it seems like the employees that they wanted to replace would be in R&D. The other question is what were they doing with those 7500 employees that was not actually necessary? Or is this just a case of giving ~8% more work to the remaining employees without paying more? Honestly I suspect the latter