My name is Namik Sarikaya; I’ve been working at Volkswagen for about 27 years.
IG Metall shop steward.
My name is Lars Hirsekorn.
I have been working at Volkswagen in Braunschweig since 1994.
My name is Thorsten Donnermeyer.
I have been working at VW for over 40 years now
and work in production.
I am also a member of the union convenor
We have, at the last
shop stewards' general meeting, raised the issue,
that we do not want the arms industry at Volkswagen
and that we must do something about it.
We have now launched a call to action,
stating that we do not agree with the fact that at Volkswagen
more and more arms production is now being introduced into the factories.
The alliance has a fairly broad scope.
This petition refers to the
IG Metall Statutes §2 on peace and disarmament.
And we call on our trade union to
oppose this militarization,
both within the workplace and outside the workplace.
We do, after all, have a job security scheme
that we “bought” last year and now there is increasing
pressure from the corporate level, from the shareholders,
that weapons be produced here,
because that yields higher profits.
The trade union official, our chairman Oliver Dietzel,
speaks at various events and calls for
people to apply for jobs in the arms industry.
They’re looking for workers.
But we believe we don’t want to produce weapons,
no instruments of murder, but we have civilian manufacturing
and we want to stick to that.
We’d rather build trams,
we’d rather build buses for public transport,
but not any missile components!
Bread and butter, or cannons
- you can’t have both.
And if you go for cannons, then there’s simply no bread
and no butter left.
And that’s not on with us.
We, as workers, will only suffer as a result.
In fact it was Ford
who was the initiator or the instigator,
which is why we said, we must do the same.
There, the shop stewards voted over- whelmingly in favour of this petition.
And something similar happened at ZF in Hanover
and we at VW also tried to bring this to the union bodies.
And that is precisely how this petition
came about, and we’re well on our way.
A number of senior officials
as well as many colleagues have signed it.
We are trying to collect the signatures
by hand. That means,
we haven’t launched a traditional petition
via the internet, but we’ve actually got signature sheets
and try to strike up a conversation with our colleagues.
That’s what matters to us:
to engage with people and have a discussion.
And yes, that’s going very well at the moment.
The situation at Volkswagen, as is well known,
is that one crisis is following another,
that around 35,000 jobs at Volkswagen’s core brand
and a further 15,000 jobs in other brands
will be lost by 2030.
And the company is, of course, using this situation
against the workers to really bring the hammer down on them.
Either you go along with this now, or you’ll be out of a job.
That’s the big stick being brandished.
Of course, there are many who say: Well,
before I loose my job, I’d produce military equipment too.
But there are already very, very many who say: We’ve been
waited for this discussion to even begin.
Up until now, people have simply kept quiet about it
and just put up with it.
And we are calling for a debate
within the workforce and within the trade union.
To me it seems a bit like this:
there’s that quote by Bertolt Brecht: “First comes food
and then comes morality.”
And if you look at the automotive and supplier industries,
then the situation is this: people have had their food taken away
and many naturally lose their moral standards as well,
because the rent still has to be paid.
The children might want to go on a school trip.
I had a discussion with a colleague
the other day about this.
He said: ‘Just wait and see for now, Thorsten
until the time comes.
and I think that if we wait and see with VW,
and our production depends on Kriege,
that everything stays so stable and relies
on doing business with it – then it’s too late!
Yes, for now it’s just a loose connection
who discussed it and said
We have to try to set something in motion,
it can’t go on like this, where people just say:
Well, Osnabrück, we’ll either we close it down
or we’ll produce weapons there. - There’s no other alternative.
And that’s precisely our demand,
that there must be an alternative.