Volkswagen's erratic communications.

Volkswagen is closing it's factory in Brussels laying off more than 3500 people. The last 5 days have been full of speculation but now we know. I can only start to imagine the social drama that will follow.

Communications toward the workers and to the media has been erratic as could be expected. I guess what happened was that senior management in Germany already decided last week about the lay offs but wanted to keep everyone in doubt till the week after so that they could prepare "the day after".

I have seen this happen more than once in my 12+ years of PR (Renault, Sabena etc...) and do not understand why straightforward, honest communications with the people who will be impacted can not happen from day one.

Technorati : Belgium, Forrest, VW, Volkswagen, Vorst

Update on Tuesday, November 21, 2006 at 23:45 by Philippe Borremans

Pieter from Leads United just posted an interesting comment to my story so I wanted to replicate it here... One of our quality newspapers called De Standaard has asked a Volkswagen employee to blog on what has been going on at the company.

Just 2 posts covering today and yesterday but it tells a real story. Several solidarity comments there and some tell the same tale... Communications is/was an issue as well in their case - most of them work(ed) in the same industry - when their factory was closed down.

I hope this person continues to blog in the next days and weeks. 

Comments

[Pietr]

Hi Philippe, did you notice that De Standaard has asked a worker of VW Vorst to blog on it's platform:

http://standaard.typepad.com/vwvorst/

It's an interesting inside view of the story, but I think someone is doing the writing for her, seeing the quotation-marks.


Pietr

ps: if you were wondering, yes, they have a Belgian PR agency advising them, but I doubt that this agency will have much of an influence on timings of all this. I'd like to hear their view on this though, so if they're reading this comment, guys, please drop me a line.

[Joeri]

Phil,
Do you really think that senior management in Germany decided these lay offs only one week before? I'm pretty sure that this was already planned since several months ago. The company I work for did the same thing somewhere early 80's. They closed our only factory in Belgium in only 2 weeks time during the holidays and from what I heared about it, it was very well planned longtime in advance and nobody(or almost) knew about it in Belgium. Big organisations who consolidated their factories in the 80's and 90's are doing the same with logistics right now. Bigger and less warehouses (and more trucks on the roads !)

Nevertheless, the latest what I heared was that Volkswagen might receive a new model of Audi to produce in 2007,2008...? Let's hope for it. But this way they were able to reduce the number of workers mostly on our government's (tax payers) cost.

Sheers
Joeri