White-collar workers now make up about 41% of Europe’s manufacturing workforce and their jobs are quietly, and quickly, disappearing, through voluntary severance, hiring freezes, outsourcing and offshoring. It rarely makes headlines, but the result is the same.
The examples are boundless. At carmaker Opel, the famed Rüsselsheim development centre is set to shrink from about 7,000 engineers in 2017 to around 1,000, with Chinese partner Leapmotor now supplying the electric architecture and battery for new electric vehicles. Chemicals giant BASF has cut about 7,000 positions since January 2024, two-thirds of them in Europe, while committing at least €12 billion to shareholders. Steel company ArcelorMittal is planning to move about 5,600 support posts, around 11% of its European workforce, to India, while having returned $1.7 billion to shareholders in 2024.
Cutting knowledge means cutting the future
Our research demonstrates how these cuts are bad for workers and for business. A firm’s ability to learn and innovate rests on its own staff and the links between them. Much technical know-how is also what we call “sticky”: it is costly to move and develops best when and where engineers and production workers solve problems together. In addition, history has shown that when engineering, R&D and business functions are outsourced or offshored, they rarely ever return. And the promised gains of downsizing, such as lower costs, higher profits and higher share prices, often fail to materialise.
Unions are fighting back against these attacks on white-collar workers
At BASF’s Ludwigshafen site, IGBCE secured an agreement ruling out compulsory dismissals until 2028. At Volvo Cars, where white-collar job cuts were announced in 2024, Swedish unions won extended notice periods and a managed transition. And industriAll Europe and IndustriALL Global Union held a day of action at ArcelorMittal’s shareholder meeting in May to protest against the company’s actions.
Our demands
IndustriAll Europe is calling on policymakers to:
- attach binding conditions to all public money: guaranteed jobs, collective bargaining, reskilling and protection against relocation, no public funds for dividends or buybacks, and clawbacks when commitments are broken;
- use European demand to support European industry, through public procurement and other incentives for European-made goods;
- keep the value chain in Europe, with affordable clean energy, and raw materials, components, research and development and final production anchored here;
- make it in Europe, with a minimum European-content threshold for publicly supported products: technology developed here, components produced here, workers skilled here and value created here.
To management, the message is equally clear: stop the job cuts in production and support services, honour collective agreements and workers’ rights to information and consultation, and invest in sites, research and skills. Abandoning technology leadership is a corporate choice, not an inevitability.
The campaign continues this autumn, building towards a mobilisation at the European Parliament in Strasbourg on 24 November
Read the full briefing here, the flyers here EN FR DE and all supporting materials on the Enough is Enough campaign page.