
Audi to Cut 9,500 Jobs to Fund Shift to Electric Vehicles - reddotX
https://www.forbes.com/sites/isabeltogoh/2019/11/26/audi-to-cut-9500-jobs-to-fund-shift-to-electric-vehicles/#384439b27ab3
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olliej
Is the money saved by axing that many employees really going to be greater
than hiring replacements for EV development?

This is a serious question: they say that they’re going to “create 2000 new
jobs”, which just seems to be an attempt to distract from them firing 7500
people and then either resetting benefits or replacing higher paid older
workers with lower paid new grads.

How much of a pay cut are the executive branches taking to free up money for
investing in the future - after all that would simply be investing a short
term pay cut for more money in the long term.

~~~
serf
> Is the money saved by axing that many employees really going to be greater
> than hiring replacements for EV development?

Yes.

My prediction : They will act like any other automotive group.

They will fire a bunch of experienced (read: overpaid) workers, hire interns
from local colleges for dirt cheap, promise them the world in advancement,
abuse them until 90 percent of them leave for greener pastures, continue
abusing the remaining 10 percent until the next market initiative 'forces' you
to 'cut jobs' so that you can 'shift to electric', that way you remain the
good guy (we're evolving to save the world!), while achieving whatever
business stratagems actually prompted the move.

Now is a prime time to do this kind of thing, the colleges are going to be
filled to the brim with students who are eyeballing EV technologies.

It's pretty win-win (for the unfired).

Really, it's just a hidden factory re-basing strategy, and it's employed all
over aerospace, too.

It'll probably happen again whenever there is some huge technology leap ,
legislative change, or social consensus.

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olliej
"overpaid" is up for debate - highly paid is the appropriate: if you have a
system that is giving people raises that exceed their capability you're
screwing up.

But my question was more in the direction of a net 7500 people fired: what
were they doing? Are they really only useful for ICEs? Audi has ~91k
employees, ~14k of which are in R&D. Where did those 7500 come from? Was half
of R&D ICE specific? Or is it from many areas?

If this is really about designing for the future it _seems_ like the employees
that they wanted to replace would be in R&D.

The other question is what were they doing with those 7500 employees that was
not actually necessary? Or is this just a case of giving ~8% more work to the
remaining employees without paying more? Honestly I suspect the latter

