GM, Opel hit by Europe-wide protests against job cut plans

FRANKFURT (AFP) - More than 40,000 people took to the streets in Europe to protest against plans by US auto giant General Motors to axe about one-fifth of its workforce in the region and possibly even close a plant.
Police estimated Tuesday that about 20,000 people demonstrated in the northwestern town of Bochum, home to one of four factories in Germany belonging to GM`s German unit Opel and currently the centre of the wave of protests.
Workers in Bochum have laid down tools for six days running ever since GM originally unveiled its plans to slash 12,000 jobs in Europe -- including 10,000 in Germany alone -- as part of a 500-million-euro (624-million-dollar) cost-cutting drive last Thursday.
The Bochum workers were joined by tens of thousands of employees at other sites around Europe on Tuesday in a joint Europe-wide day of protest.
Police estimated that 14,000-16,000 people took to the streets in Opel`s home town of Ruesselsheim.
About 3,000 workers also laid down tools at a factory in Kaiserslautern.
GM workers in Britain, where 400 jobs also face the chop, were similarly set to down tools briefly.
And while no stoppages as such were to be held at Opel`s Polish factory in Gliwice or the Spanish plant in Zaragoza, workers there were expected to attend meetings in a show of solidarity with their German colleagues.
"There are solidarity flags in the factory. A banner proclaiming `Protest Action` has been hung over the administration building," a representative of the Solidarity union in Gliwice told AFP.
Gliwice, in the south of Poland, employs 2,000 workers who produce 40,000 Opel Astra II cars each year.
"We are distributing leaflets to the staff to inform them of the situation. We express our solidarity with the German workers and their families," the union official said.
"We protest against job cuts and attempts to set workers from different countries and plants against each other," he added.
It is the Bochum factory, seen as one of the likely candidates for closure, that is currently the centre of the wave of protests.
It supplies key parts and components to most other GM factories around Europe and fallout from the six days of stoppages was already making itself felt at other sites on Tuesday.
Production of Opel`s Vectra models at the firm`s main factory in Ruesselsheim near Frankfurt, for example, ground to a halt owing to a lack of exhaust pipes, which are made in Bochum, a company spokesman said.
Ruesselsheim is also seen as a possible candidate for closure.
And production at Opel`s northern Belgium factory in Antwerp was set to be interrupted from 2:00 pm (1200 GMT) because of supply problems, according to Opel`s spokesman in Belgium, Marco Van Riel.
Meanwhile, while politicians continued to appeal for calm, the labour conflict looked set to escalate further.
A report in the daily Die Welt said that Opel`s management was planning to sack without notice the organisers of the protests, which it terms wildcat strikes and are therefore illegal under German labour law.
Strikes are only permissable in Germany if they are directly called for by unions following an official strike ballot.
A spokesman for GM Europe rejected the report.
Nevertheless, the head of the powerful IG Metall labour union Juergen Peters warned Opel against sackings because that would only lead to a further escalation of the situation, he told German Deutschlandfunk radio.
"We have to find a solution. People want to know what`s going to happen with them," Peters said.
The solution must entail no plant closures and above all "security for employees," he said. "We have to talk about how such drastic restructuring can be implemented without forced redundancies."
In the meantime, Opel management in Ruesselsheim said it hoped to reach a "joint solution" with unions to safeguard the group`s German manufacturing facilities.
Both management and unions were seeking a "joint solution for making the Ruesselsheim and Bochum factories so competitive that they can be retained as car manufacturing plants beyond 2010", Opel said in a statement.
The job cuts would be implemented in a "socially acceptable" way, the statement said, issued after initial talks between management and the works council on Monday.
Further negotiations between management and the works council would be continued "without delay` and would be conducted internally, the statement added.