Unions to take centre stage in Volkswagen’s future

Reorganising and restructuring the sprawling Volkswagen Group, especially in Europe, has been a challenge which has seen off many senior managers and CEOs in recent years. Herbert Diess ran the company between 2018 and 2022, but his confrontational style and aggressive push for electric vehicles (EVs) was not successful; his successor, Oliver Blume, has retrenched on EVs, significantly delayed the scalable systems platform while ensuring it can also make engines, and is working through a jobs cull potentially affecting 50,000 positions in Germany alone.