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Opel To Offer Buyouts For Bochum Plant Transmission Employees

Opel has made it official for some time that it will cease vehicle production at its Bochum, Germany plant. This might seem a bit surprising, but this is the first shutdown of a car factory in Germany since World War II.

If you don’t know much about Bochum, that’s fine. We’ve never been there, but more people probably drive manuals there. As far as the Opel plant goes, transmissions for Opel and Vauxhall cars are made by 300 employees, whom will be receiving severance packages by the end of this year. The transmission department is one of many branches at the facility, and the others will continue to stay open even after the transmission unit closes up. Employees who choose not to take the severance package will have the opportunity to move to another Opel factory, or join a transfer company for a period of 12 months, to help them find a new career.

According to The Detroit News, Opel’s primary reason for closing the plant is to reduce some costs for its less profitable brands, along with some less-than-ideal union negotiations.

Since 1999, Opel and Vauxhall have seen combined losses of $18 billion, and wish to change that, and the closing of Bochum is part of the company’s plan to do so.

 

A metro Detroit native, Alex Sizeland is GM Authority's staff writer with a focus on covering GM culture and performance cars.

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  1. Today is the last day of the transmission production in the Bochum plant.
    This article in the regional newspaper WAZ (online as “Der Westen” – the west) details the severance packages (in German, yes), according to the 2011 agreement:

    Multiply the age of the worker by the years of employment at Opel and her/his gross montly wage, and divide this by 35. So a 40-year old having worked 15 years at Opel with a gross monthly wage of 3100 Euro would get 53,142 Euro, a 55 years old with 24 years at Opel would get 116,914 €. These lump sums are subject to income tax.

    This agreement is valid only for those 300 leftovers in the transmission department, not for the rest in the vehicle assembly, which GM wants to close end of 2014, moving the Zafira assembly to Rüsselsheim.

    As to Bochum – the city is one of the conglomerate of cities which form the Ruhr valley industrial district, stretching from Duisburg in the West to Dortmund in the East, giving home to about 5 or 8.5 million people. Once grown by coal mining and steel production, the area is in deep crisis going thru the ordeal of closing down coal mining altogether, and the steel industry having taken big hits of several plant closures. And the substitution industry like automobile production is closing now, too. For more info on the city, look up the Wikipedia articles on “Bochum” and “Ruhr area”.

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