Volkswagen employees have criticised the management board’s “disastrous external communication” over the group’s ongoing restructuring, according to an internal works council survey published on the company intranet, with staff and their families describing themselves as “unsettled and frightened”. The findings arrive just ahead of nine extraordinary works meetings scheduled across German plants this week, beginning in Wolfsburg on 25 August.

The criticism centres less on the substance of the cuts—although much contention remains around this too—but the lack of detail surrounding them. Chief Executive Oliver Blume reiterated to staff in a memo 21 August that the same four plants that have been earmarked for potential closure—Emden, Hanover, Neckarsulm and Zwickau—are not expected to reach competitive capacity utilisation through the 2030s. Still, he stressed no decision has been made on specific closures. Workers pressed for clearer answers on those sites, on job security, and on the future of early-retirement and severance programmes, and none of these were resolved in the latest memo.

Blume has rejected out of hand persistent accusations that Volkswagen is withholding information from its workforce, saying in July that the company “continuously” keeps employees informed “through internal channels, but above all through direct personal dialogue”. The restructuring itself remains Volkswagen’s largest ever, potentially including a further 50,000 job cuts on top of the 50,000 already planned, or the carve-out of entire divisions. Blume has cautioned that the agreed-upon 50,000 figure is in fact, “not a fixed target” but rather “an indicator of the scale of action required”.

The financial case for deeper cuts is not really in dispute internally, even if it will prove highly painful for workers. Blume said Volkswagen’s overhead costs remain more than 30% above comparable automakers, and that current margins of 3.8%, while reasonably enough in the present environment, are “by no means sufficient to generate enough funds in the long term for new technologies, new products and our sites”.

Zwickau’s own utilisation is forecast to fall from 88% this year to just 42% by 2030. The trajectory is bad enough that its inclusion among the threatened plants is difficult to dispute on cost grounds alone, regardless of how badly the wider announcement has landed with staff. Chinese automakers are looking to use, or even outright acquire, existing European production facilities to make their own vehicles, but some of Volkswagen’s most viable partners here have also criticised how well-equipped these sites are. Xpeng has been in talks with Volkswagen about potentially acquiring a brownfield site, but one of the company’s executives described those same sites as “a little bit old” earlier in 2026.

Volkswagen’s governance structure gives labour meaningful leverage to slow the process rather than simply object to it. Lower Saxony, which holds a shareholding and a veto on the supervisory board, and worker representatives together control half of that board’s seats, meaning Blume’s insistence that deeper cuts are existential still has to clear a body entirely capable of delaying or diluting whatever scale of restructuring management ultimately proposes. The state’s premier and culture minister, both supervisory board members, visited the Hanover plant on 24 August.

A parallel dispute is intensifying over Volkswagen’s software strategy. A report reportedly commissioned by Audi is said to sharply criticise the group’s in-house software unit Cariad. The unit has been the subject of extensive criticism in recent years over delays, and subsequently relegated largely to a coordinator of externally-developed software. Employees have countered in off-the-record interviews that lack of discipline and competing interests between various brands were a major contributor to delays.

The report supposedly even outlines options for dissolving it, with Audi Chief Executive Gernot Döllner pushing to bring in external partners—Nvidia for autonomous driving and Rivian for vehicle software—while Blume wants to keep Cariad intact. The disagreement suggests Volkswagen’s sprawling house of brands remains divided on how centralised the answer to the group’s competitiveness problem should be, adding a second axis of internal conflict alongside the plant and job cuts.

If the works council’s own framing is accurate, that families are frightened by how little has been said rather than by what has actually been proposed, then Volkswagen’s communication strategy may be generating more instability than a clear, even unwelcome, restructuring plan would. Blume’s supervisory board still has to navigate that gap before any of the harder decisions on Emden, Hanover, Neckarsulm or Zwickau can actually be finalised.