Camaraderie and solidarity at Opel in Bochum. Bochum’s Opel workers with a transnational background share their recollections.

The Opel plants in Bochum – an attractive employer for 30 years

 

Whilst mining and the iron and steel industry of the Ruhr area had meant good earning potential for the great-grandfather and grandfather generations of migrant workers from present day parts of Poland during the first modern age of industrialisation, for the generation of late emigrants this was embodied by the many thousands of jobs created since 1962 at Opel Bochum, a subsidiary of the General Motors Group from the US that had acquired Opel in 1929. Established during the first peak of the mining crisis at the start of the 1960s, the only car facility in the Ruhr area to date developed into a particularly desirable employer with more than 22,000 employees in the 1980s. During this heyday, the legendary models included the Kadett, GT, Manta and Ascona, followed later by the Zafira. The establishing of Opel was the starting point for Bochum’s second modern age, which was followed by other significant sites being established, such as the Ruhr University and the Ruhr Park shopping centre, which changed not only the picture of the town, which had once been defined by coal and steel, but also its attitude to life. For 30 years, into the 1990s, having a job with Opel particularly meant secure terms and conditions of employment. In this phase of Bochum’s second modernisation, the fear of losing your job was an unknown. Willi Gröber, an Opel worker from the very beginning, and later on the works council and ultimately trade union secretary with IG Metall in Bochum, remembers: “At Opel you really had to steal golden spoons to lose your job.” The car became a symbol of the town’s recovery which seemed to overcome the effect the coal crisis had had on the labour market. It continued merrily on the up for many decades or it was simply OK!

This good quality of life based on secure income and working conditions only began to change gradually for the Opel workers in Bochum in the 1990s. During the formation of the single European market and the collapse of the Iron Curtain, the large German car manufacturers, with Volkswagen and Opel leading the way, started to develop cross-border production and supplier networks which were supposed to allow management to compare labour and production costs between various sites in Europe. These business analyses ultimately created the conditions for playing off employees from different production sites against each other.

For Opel in Bochum, the opening of the Opel plant in Gliwice in Upper Silesia in 1998 played an important role. Although only the Opel Astra from Bochum was built in Poland at first, this was then followed by the Zafira which made cost comparisons between the two sites easier. The establishing of Opel as an attractive employer in Silesia was of similar economic significance to the people there as it had been in Bochum in the 1960s. In Poland, Opel also made a considerable contribution to the region’s economic upturn and to the positive changes in its industrial structure. For the employees at Opel in Bochum, however, the new site in Gliwice started a phase of open competition around maintaining jobs and securing earning opportunities, just as the European management at Opel had intended, and this competition was partly responsible for production capacities being moved within Europe and finally to the closing of Opel Bochum in 2014 – after 52 years. Ultimately, the somewhat outdated Opel plants in Bochum were no match in the battle to compete with the comparatively young sites within Europe and their lean production concepts based on the Japanese Toyota system.