Opel workers stage work stoppages in protest against job cuts

FRANKFURT (AFP) - German Economy Minister Wolfgang Clement urged workers at car maker Opel to return to work on Friday as angry walkouts were staged for the second day in a row to protest General Motors' plans to slash thousands of jobs in Europe and perhaps even close a plant.
Emerging from crisis talks with the regional state government of Hesse and Opel representatives here, Clement insisted that "work must resume".
The minister said he understood workers' worries, but he urged employees to return to work.
Production was halted at Opel's factory in Bochum for a second day on Friday in protest at plans by the group's US parent, General Motors, to axe 12,000 jobs in Europe, with 10,000 jobs facing the chop in Germany alone.
Opel supervisory board chief and the deputy chief of GM Europe, Carl-Peter Forster, said strike action was "not helpful" in the current climate.
There were no work stoppages at Opel's other German factories in Ruesselsheim, near Frankfurt, in Kaiserslautern or in Eisenach.
The deputy head of the works council at Bochum, Rainer Einenkel, said that once management had made commitments to secure the factory's future, workers would return to work "immediately".
GM Europe's deputy chief Carl-Peter Forster insisted that the figure of 10,000 job cuts was not set in stone.
"It's no dogma," he told journalists after meeting with unions.
"It was simply intended to give an indication of the size of the problem," he said.
The main thing now was to draw up a concept with unions as rapidly as possible, Forster said.
"What we want now is to assuage our employees' fears as quickly as possible."
The head of Opel's works council Klaus Franz said the workforce was not willing to accept as many as 10,000 job cuts.
But he added: "I don't want to give any illusion. We're not going to be able to get through this process without job cuts."
He reiterated employees' demands that there be no forced redundancies, no plant closures and no outsourcing of production.
In an interview in the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the head of GM Europe, Fritz Henderson, again refused to rule out possible plant closures in the medium term.
"We won't close any factories between now and 2006. But after that, we can't guarantee anything," Henderson said.
Opel's main sites in Ruesselsheim and Bochum "are the least competitive," he added.
GM has recently said it wanted to build its mid-range Saab and Opel models at a single plant and that could mean that either the Ruesselsheim factory or the Saab plant in Trollhaettan could eventually be shut down.
"It doesn't mean that the factory that loses the race will automatically be shut down," Henderson said. "But it's not going to be pleasant," he added.
Unions have called workers at all of GM Europe's factories in Europe to join in a day of protest next Tuesday.
GM's plans for a cull of its workforce in Europe sparked fierce criticism from the government.
President Horst Koehler accused the GM management of neglecting to maintain the competitiveness of its European factories.
"The problems of German automotive companies' competitiveness can be explained by negligence in the company's conduct and then in maintaining competitivity," Koehler told journalists during a visit to Prague.
In Berlin, the German government said it would refuse to foot the bill for the "flagrant" errors made by the management of ailing private-sector companies such as retail giant KarstadtQuelle or car maker Opel.
For years, managers "had slept through market developments and made the wrong strategic decisions," the government's deputy spokesman Thomas Steg said.
The companies' current woes could not be attributed to any fundamental problems with Germany as an industrial and economic site.
Steg hit out at GM in particular, which had failed to pay sufficient regard to German corporate culture.
In face of such anger, GM launched a publicity campaign in the national daily press on Friday in a bid to persuade the public of the necessity of the cuts.
It insisted it would continue to build cars in Germany and in Europe and to invest billions of dollars in the region.