DaimlerChrysler wants labor concessions

STUTTGART, Germany – DaimlerChrysler will move production of future versions of its Mercedes-Benz C-Class cars away from the company’s biggest German plant – costing 6,000 jobs – unless it gets about about $620 million a year in cost savings, company executives said Monday.

Personnel chief Guenther Flieg said workers at Sindelfingen outside the company’s Stuttgart base must bring labor costs in line with those at factories in the north German city of Bremen and in East London, South Africa.

Otherwise, new C-Class model production will be moved to those facilities “and the alternative would be we will have to part with 6,000 workers,” most of them at Sindelfingen, Flieg told reporters. Some 41,000 people work at Sindelfingen now.

Mercedes-Benz chief Juergen Hubbert said that “the Sindelfingen factory is not the most productive plant, by a long ways.”

The company is pressing its German workers to cut paid breaks and extra pay for late shifts and weekends before it will guarantee the company will invest in further production, which is not expected to begin until 2007.

Similar trade-offs of cost concessions in return for guaranteed work are common in the German auto industry and are usually negotiated without great fanfare. This set of negotiations has been more rancorous and worker representatives have called for a nationwide day of protest by DaimlerChrysler workers on Thursday.