Without a new car to manufacture, the plant could simply close its doors in a few months. In this catastrophic scenario on a human level, 1,510 workers could be laid off by the end of October, then 1,110 by May 2025. The remaining 300 or so employees would be released before the end of the year.
“Looking for excuses”
In addition to “an overall decline in orders in the luxury electric vehicle segment,” Audi cites “long-standing structural difficulties at the Brussels site,” such as the plant’s proximity to the city center and high logistics costs. “We have always been a flexible, productive factory, with a very good output, so looking for excuses now is nonsense,” retorts Maurizio Sabatino, delegate of the Christian union CSC, contacted by L’Usine Nouvelle.
After 40 years at the Forest factory, the man says he is pessimistic about the future of the industrial site. “When you look for investors, it’s because there is a problem. When you announce the implementation of the Renault Law, it’s dramatic.” The “Renault Procedure”, as it is officially known, governs collective redundancies in Belgium. It was established in 1998, a few months after the sudden closure of the Renault plant in Vilvoorde, which left more than 3,000 employees out of work.
Complex relationships with employees and authorities
The sword of Damocles has been hanging over the Brussels site for several months. After a decade of producing the successful small A1 model (now manufactured in Spain), Audi Brussels turned to the high-end electric range from 2018, producing the Audi e-tron and then the Q8 e-tron from 2022. “We have been worried for a year, since we learned that the new version of the Q8 would be produced in Mexico” (in the San José Chiapa plant, which was built in 2016), Maurizio Sabatino continues. In recent months, production at the Brussels plant has declined significantly, from twenty cars per hour to fifteen. The site, which produced 50,000 vehicles in 2023, must produce almost half as many in 2024, or 22,000 units (of which 16,000 have already been delivered).
Things really started to go wrong in February, when the German press revealed that Audi was considering selling its Belgian assembly plant. The first tensions arose in April, when the company announced the elimination of 371 temporary jobs after a two-week shutdown of the production line. A few weeks before the federal elections in June, the now-resigned Prime Minister Alexander De Croo took up the matter personally. His aim: “save as many jobs as possible.”
A working group was set up by the authorities, who sent a letter of intent to Audi in June, aimed at convincing the manufacturer not to leave Belgian soil (possibility of granting rail freight slots during the day, tax deduction of investments, support for staff training, work flexibility, etc.).
Lack of transparency
Proposals that have so far remained a dead letter. Since the start of the summer break, the situation has been turning sour. After Audi’s official announcement, tensions with the authorities were revealed in broad daylight. “Were we betrayed? Let’s say that things happened differently than what Audi explained to us,” said the tenant of 16 rue de la Loi. Many people denounce Audi’s lack of transparency in its communication. “They lied to us from the beginning. They say we have to work together, have trust… but in whom?” asks Maurizio Sabatino. At a general staff meeting held on Friday, August 23, the factory management was greeted with jeers and insults (“liars!”, “sellouts!”).
Anger is brewing among workers, worried as no concrete future is emerging for them. Can Audi Brussels remain an assembly site? Or will it have to turn to the production of spare parts? Could it continue to assemble battery housings for the group? Audi recently invested in a highly automated building that assembles batteries using cells produced by Samsung SDI in Hungary. But would this production make sense if the final assembly of the vehicles takes place several hundred kilometers from Brussels?
“We want to manufacture a car in Brussels”
“We want a model, we want to manufacture a car in Brussels. It is completely absurd to close the site in the current situation (of electric transition)”, exclaims Gregory Dascotte, from the socialist union FGTB. But this possibility seems very unlikely at the moment, while Audi seems to want to part with the facilities. An Asian company is said to have recently visited the premises.
This painful episode recalls the difficulties of 2006, when Volkswagen ended production of its Golf on the site before selling it to its subsidiary Audi. This choice allowed Audi Brussels to find a second wind, producing almost a million models of the A1. Can such a scenario be repeated in 2024?
Nothing is less certain, as the German conglomerate tends to reduce its production capacities with the aim of making savings due to falling sales (Audi sold nearly 316,898 vehicles in Europe in the first seven months of 2024, or 7.5% less than in 2023). While waiting for a hypothetical end to the crisis, production should resume from Wednesday, September 4 after a long summer break.
Source: www.usinenouvelle.com
