FRANKFURT (AFP) - Porsche, the German maker of luxury sports cars, wants to extend working hours and cut jobs, its chairman said in a newspaper interview at a time when other car makers in Germany are also drastically reducing their workforce in an attempt to drive down costs.
"In our production facilities, those jobs that become free are not being replaced since we have been able to sharply increase output per worker," Porsche chairman Wendelin Wiedeking told the Financial Times Deutschland without providing any concrete figures.
In August 2003, when Porsche held its last headcount, the car maker employed a workforce of just over 10,000.
Porsche has embarked on a programme to boost productivity to help counter the negative effects of the weak dollar, Wiedeking said.
The German firm generates nearly half of its revenues in dollars.
"We're holding intensive talks with workers, for example about the infamous five-minute 'pee break'" that forms part of a wage agreement in Porsche's home state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, Wiedeking said
The break, which gives workers five minutes every hour to go the toilet, "is a relic that needs to be looked at," the chairman said.
Fellow car maker DaimlerChrysler recently succeeded in abolishing the break and extending working hours at the end of a recent fierce battle with employees.
Auto makers in Germany are currently wrestling to push through draconian cost-cutting measures.
US car giant General Motors has sparked mass protests across the country by announcing plans to slash as many as 10,000 jobs at its German unit Opel.
And the country's biggest car maker Volkswagen is also planning a two-year wage freeze and a 30-percent reduction in labour costs by 2011 and has threatened to axe 30,000 jobs if it does not succeed.