
A WIN Discussion October 2024. Listen to the meeting HERE. At this week’s WIN meeting we welcomed a well-known militant activist in Germany: Thorsten Donnermeier is chair of the divisional Volkswagen shop stewards’ council and a member of the union shop stewards’ committee for all Volkswagen factory locations in Kassel, representing more than 10,000 union members. Together with other grass-roots union activists, Thorsten is currently challenging the company’s product policy, which has contributed to the current crisis and threatens the destruction of more than 10,000 jobs and several plant closures – and not only in Germany!Thorsten insists that “sustainable and secure jobs require sustainable products“, and stands for a new product strategy, away from cars and towards public transportation systems. He has gained support for this strategy from the current environmental movement and public media interest in his ideas in the media, including on Deutschlandfunk (the German equivalent of the BBC). He stands for international workers’ solidarity, an end to competition between Volkswagen workforces in Germany and worldwide which drives down working conditions, and support for VW plants in Germany and abroad that are threatened by plant closures. This includes a campaign in support of colleagues at the Audi plant in Brussels, which is currently under threat of closure. He says: “We urgently need international contacts with automobile workers to network resistance against mass layoffs and wage cuts.”