An agreement was signed early Tuesday morning on how Airbus production in Germany is to be restructured. According to the agreement, the representatives of Airbus and the IG Metall trade union agreed on a package that will safeguard jobs and locations until 2030. On the contrary - the number of employees in Germany is even to be increased by 15 to 20 percent. This means that the strikes are off the table, after 10 months of negotiations on the future structure and around 21,000 employees had taken part in warning strikes in December.

"We have created the magic win-win situation," explained Daniel Friedrich, district manager of IG Metall Küste in a joint digital press conference with Airbus. As part of the agreement, Airbus is founding a new subsidiary company for section assembly, in which the assembly of aircraft fuselages, previously spread across many locations, will be consolidated. The individual parts production of the supplier subsidiary Premium Aerotec, with sites in Augsburg, Varel and Romania, is to be sold to the family-owned company Muhr und Bender KG from North Rhine-Westphalia - although the decision is still subject to union approval.

"The collective agreement secures jobs in the long term and creates prospects for the sites under the Airbus umbrella," said Holger Junge, head of Airbus' Group Works Council, commenting on the result reached after 18 hours of negotiations. Accordingly, redundancies for operational reasons are ruled out until the end of 2030. In addition, there are firm commitments for investments that will enable the sites to be further developed: "This is a good basis for jointly achieving the production ramp-up and working on the aircraft of the future."

The agreement in Germany will allow Airbus to implement its industrial realignment concept, according to a press release from the multinational, which had already set the course for industrial realignment in France at the turn of the year. This, it said, would make it possible to enable the strong increase in production in the coming years while preparing for the future and the construction of zero-emission aircraft by 2035.

Photo by Daniel Eledut