Cat out of the bag at Vaillant

Management is planning to:

• Give up the sites in Bad Kreuznach, Germany and in Le Mans, France entirely.
• No longer have any production at the sites in Pontenure, Italy, Vitoria, Spain and Gera, Germany.
• The Remscheid site will lose the production of heating value devices (except for those destined for Turkey) and the Roding site will lose the production of gas valves.

The jobs which are being lost are for the most part to be shifted to Skalica, Slovakia, to Nantes, France, to Gelsenkirchen and Remscheid, Germany and Wuxi, China.

According to management's own calculations, a total of 280 workers will be affected. According to the plans most of them will lose their jobs, although almost 140 new jobs are to be created in Slovakia.

The European Works Council is currently attempting to gain a detailed overview of the situation and find out what strategy is behind it. Then the task will be to review what additional possibilities there are for the employees of the Vaillant Group and what alternatives there are to the redundancy programme.

It will be supported by experts and by the European Metalworkers' Federation. In spite of the scanty information available at present, it can already be said that a lot of things relating to MP3 are contradictory and illogical.

For example, agency workers are being hired at sites which are to be closed. No fait accompli should take place at any site before we have obtained an overview of the entire situation!

We are demanding that management does not conduct any local negotiations on redundancies and social plans as long as the European Works Council has not issued a statement or position.

We are furthermore calling on management to discuss alternatives to the closure plans with us. Some employees have already started fighting against the plans, as aside from boosting the already substantial profits no need for MP₃ is apparent. The colleagues in Vitoria, Spain, for example, are confronting the Vaillant rabbit with the horns of Spanish bulls.

And our colleagues in Bad Kreuznach, Germany, are fighting back as well. They closed ranks in a show of force in the inner city, where they staged a demonstration. You can see pictures of this at: http://www2.igmetall.de/homepages/netzwerke/ebr/vaillantsaunierduval.html (The site is still under construction, additional languages are to be provided.)

The European Works Council is also preparing a concerted campaign; we will inform you about it in good time. What is dangerous about the MP₃ project is that underlying it is a strategy which jeopardises all sites in Europe and should cause an ice-cold cold shiver to go down the spines of the present-day winners of jobs.

This is at any rate suggested by information received to date. The management has emphasised that the plans have not been finalised yet.

All of the employee representatives and the European Works Council of the Vaillant Group take this very seriously!

We shall judge the honesty and sincerity of the management by its willingness to accept the alternatives submitted by works councils.

We all have a right to find out where all this is leading!