This is a really big deal, truly unprecedented in modern German history.

Volkswagen (VOWG_p.DE), opens new tab plans to shut at least three factories in Germany, lay off tens of thousands of staff and shrink its remaining plants in Europe’s biggest economy as it plots a deeper-than-expected overhaul, the company’s works council head said on Monday.

Europe’s biggest carmaker has been negotiating for weeks with unions over plans to revamp its business and cut costs, including considering plant closures on home soil for the first time, in a blow to Germany’s industrial prowess.

Volkswagen reiterated on Monday that restructuring was needed and said it would make concrete proposals on Wednesday.

“Management is absolutely serious about all this. This is not sabre-rattling in the collective bargaining round,” Daniela Cavallo, Volkswagen’s works council head, told employees at the carmaker’s biggest plant, in Wolfsburg, threatening to break off talks.

“This is the plan of Germany’s largest industrial group to start the sell-off in its home country of Germany,” Cavallo added, not specifying which plants would be affected or how many of Volkswagen Group’s roughly 300,000 staff in Germany could be laid off.

The Times has more:

Volkswagen reported a 42 percent drop in quarterly profit on Wednesday, while emphasizing an “urgent need” to cut costs and gain efficiency in a challenging marketplace as it considers plant closures and layoffs in Germany.

The automaker’s negotiator pointed to the company’s weak earnings ahead of his meeting with union leaders, who warned of imminent strikes if a solution to cut costs and restructure the brand was not found.

The Volkswagen Group, which owns 10 brands, including Audi and Porsche, is Germany’s largest industrial employer, with 120,000 people working for its eponymous core brand. The country’s vision of itself as an economic powerhouse and automotive giant is also deeply intertwined with Volkswagen, and local economies across the country depend on the company and its well-paid workers.

Representatives from the automaker and IG Metall, the union representing most of its workers, convened for a second round of wage negotiations on Wednesday in a conference room in the Volkswagen Arena, the stadium of the company’s professional soccer team, VfL Wolfsburg.

Before the talks, Volkswagen reported that profit fell to 2.86 billion euros, or $3.1 billion, for the months of August to September, its lowest level in three years. The company is struggling against falling demand in China, the world’s largest car market, and high costs, especially in its homeland, Germany.

“The situation is getting worse,” Arne Meiswinkel, the chief of personnel at Volkswagen, who is leading negotiations for the company, told reporters before the negotiations began.

But union leaders insisted that a guarantee by the company that all 10 of its factories in Germany would remain open was a prerequisite for them to stay at the negotiating table. The union is prevented from staging any strikes until the end of November, but leaders said that they would begin preparing walkouts unless their demand was met.

This feels like American style unionbusting here, with threats to move production to Poland and other cheaper nations. I don’t know enough about Germany to really have much to offer, except to say that I can’t imagine this won’t play a major impact in German politics and I wonder what the government will do here.

The post What’s Going on at Volkswagen? appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

We have a name! And a logo!

It’s been more than half a year since the WNBA announced that the Golden State Warriors ownership group would be granted an expansion team in San Francisco. And it’s been over a week since that expansion team, then unnamed, announced Ohemaa Nyanin as their inaugural GM.

And now, on the day that the 2024 WNBA season tips off — the final season before Golden State enters the fray — we know the name for the Bay Area’s WNBA squad.

On Tuesday morning, the team officially announced their name, logo, and color scheme. And so we welcome the newest member of Bay Area sports: the Golden State Valkyries.

Check it out:

The Valkyries went all-in on day one marketing, as they certainly should, even getting Kehlani to narrate their inspiring introductory video.

They also shared the ins and outs of the gorgeous, highly-detailed logo.

And they snapped a few pictures of Warriors players repping the gear of their sister team.

The Valkyries made the choice to start fresh with their own color scheme, rather than follow the Warriors’ color scheme. That’s a choice that some will certainly criticize, though I like it. There are obvious ties between the two organizations, from the city and arena they call home, to the ownership group, to the name — Dictionary.com defines “valkyrie” as “any of the beautiful maidens attendant upon Odin who bring the souls of slain warriors chosen by Odin or Tyr to Valhalla and there wait upon them” (emphasis mine) — and I like the WNBA squad getting a chance to brand independently with their own colors.

We’ll unfortunately have to wait to see those colors on the court, as the Valkyries won’t debut until the 2025 WNBA season. But hey, that’s only a year away now! And if you’re planning on following the Valkyries but are new to the WNBA, I strongly recommend following the league this year — it’s an absolute joy, and League Pass is incredibly affordable.

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

[“Ladycocks” is right out.]

Last night, the 2024 women’s college basketball tournament concluded, with the South Carolina Gamecocks defeating the Iowa Hawkeyes. Aside from the recent success of the women’s basketball program, sports teams from the University of South Carolina have not been particularly good historically. Though the school was founded in 1801, South Carolina’s first national championship in any sport didn’t come until two centuries later, in 2002. Nevertheless, in the ’90s, apparel from the school was very popular. Specifically, this classy cap was a common sight hundreds of miles away in New Jersey:

Another oft-spotted headwear option in that area originated from a school thousands of miles across the country, Oregon State:

I present without comment the fact that this image originated from Dicks.com.¹

Both of these are a style called the “Bar” hat, made by sportswear brand “The Game”. Bar hats were particularly popular at the end of the 20th century, displaying the names or nicknames of dozens of different colleges and their sports teams. The two above, however, were particularly widespread sources of juvenile japery. Yes, many an adolescent boy strolled into Lids at their closest Garden State mall to purchase a hat featuring a slang term for genitalia.

I was a teenager myself in that era, but I wanted a different option. In an effort to subvert the puerile humor of others, I sought out the single goofiest Bar hat I could find. After much contemplation, I opted to rep the University of California, Santa Cruz:

Go Banana Slugs!⁴

Back to South Carolina, though, and their matchup last night. I know that a “hawkeye” is “a native of Iowa”, a much cooler demonym than “Iowan”. However, I recently had the realization that I wasn’t sure what a “gamecock” was. So, I looked it up, which revealed that it means “a rooster of the domestic chicken trained for fighting”. Oh.

And also, yikes. On multiple levels, that’s a terrible name for one of the best women’s college basketball teams in the country.

Footnotes:

1. Speaking of which, there’s a recent TV ad for the company that has repeatedly caught my attention.² When Will Arnett says “Have I heard of Dicks.com?!”, it sounds like he’s about to launch into an epically filthy joke.³↩︎

2. That ad is archived here. ↩︎

3. A friend-of-the-site who shall remain anonymous informed me that once upon a time, Dick’s Sporting Goods did not own the Dicks.com domain name. It was, in fact, porn, as Archive.org can show you, if you really feel the need to confirm it, or you’re just feeling lonely.

   It appears the retailer took ownership of the domain around the beginning of 2011.↩︎

4. Old school netizens know that banana slugs are fearsome, and indeed, one of the most vicious and pathological predators of human beings on the planet. ↩︎