It’s a bad time to work at Volkswagen. The company is cutting production capacity, has already signed a deal to slash wage expenses, and now a new report says the expected job cuts are coming. And there are a lot of them… thousands upon thousands, all coming by the end of this year. And even more will happen by 2030. Here’s what to expect.
Volkswagen Has Been Struggling For A Decade
Blue 2024 VW ID.Buzz side shotVolkswagen
Volkswagen’s financial troubles are no secret. Massive fines and recalls around the world over Dieselgate rolled into huge spending to develop electric vehicles. Even though the Volkswagen Group sold nearly one million EVs last year, that’s not even close to what it had planned.
Sales of the gas and diesel models are down, too. In 2019, Volkswagen alone sold 6.3 million vehicles and the Group sold just shy of 11 million. In 2025, VW moved 4.7 million cars and the Group sold 8.9. That’s millions of vehicles in extra capacity, and the sales trend hasn’t shown signs of increasing.
19,000 Job Cuts Before The End Of The Year
So at the company’s annual general meeting on June 18, CEO Oliver Blume will have some more bad news. Reuters reports that it saw a transcript of the upcoming speech, showing 19,000 jobs were going away by the end of 2026. And it doesn’t stop there; more than 28,000 cuts in total are allegedly coming by 2030, the report said.
In April, Blume said that the VW Group planned to cut another one million vehicles from its production capacity. That brings the number down from around 12 million in 2019 to closer to 9 million units.
Related
VW Group’s Tariff Losses Sound More Like A Powerball Jackpot
The group has already lost more than $1.5 billion to tariffs.
Company Has Already Announced Massive Cuts
Volkswagen Transparent FactoryVolkswagen
At that time, he said that most of the cuts would be at VW and Audi plants in Europe. Blum said that it would cut its headcount by around 50,000 by the end of the decade in Germany alone.
Volkswagen will likely get into a fight with its labor groups if it closes more factories in Germany. A deal made between VW and union IG Metall at the end of 2024 was meant to help curb factory closures and further job cuts until at least 2030.
That agreement saved Volkswagen €1.5 billion ($1.56 billion) per year and was intended to help allow €15 billion ($15.6 billion) per year in cost savings in the medium term. When that agreement was signed, VW said it would cut 35,000 workers in a “socially responsible reduction.” This was believed to mean retirements and cuts from non-union positions.
Before these cuts, Volkswagen had around 120,000 employees in Germany. It’s not clear how many it will have at the end of the cost-cutting plan. Some of the shifts in manufacturing are already underway, including moving production of the Volkswagen Golf from the company’s home in Wolfsburg to its plant in Puebla, Mexico.
Related
Volkswagen’s Cost Cutting Keeps Getting Worse
VW says as many as 50,000 jobs need to be cut in Germany alone.
VW’s US plant should be safe from any cuts. It produces vehicles designed and built for the US. The Scout plant currently under construction in South Carolina is also likely to remain unaffected.
CarBuzz Insight – Why This Matters:
Volkswagen’s cuts are another sign of a legacy automaker struggling. While it sold nearly 1 million EVs last year, meeting the target it set in 2018, profits fell. It only made 5 billion euros on building and selling cars. The figure seems like a lot, but to the company it is a disaster. So now it is slashing everything, hoping that will help return bigger profits. It’s a great plan until the cars start to suffer. Then you’re on a spiral from bad to worse.
Source: Reuters
