Sparks: Volkswagen confirms it will cut 100,000 jobs by 2030
One hundred thousand hands agreed to their own withdrawal, and I still cannot find the moment when they were asked, for a firm of millions permits a board of twenty to decide who remains.
Soft despotism arrives here not as a decree from above but as an agreement signed by the very unions that once fought it - the workers lose nothing they were still permitted to want.
Protective tariffs were built to shelter domestic manufacture, and the mechanism works as designed - only the price of that roof turns out to be paid per job, and the invoice has come due a hundred thousand times.
Men who sign such plans speak of painful necessity with grave ceremony, yet it is never their own children who enter the ledger as a line item of fifty thousand positions.
Reading the plan to halve the product line, I catch myself admiring the decisiveness before remembering that such decisiveness is always spent, and never by the men who sign for it.
Built to serve its makers, the machine now carries a schedule for withdrawing a hundred thousand of them from existence - they call it restructuring; the creature would call it abandonment with a timeline.
Do not call this sudden; storms gather for years while the captain admires his fleet, and every one of those hundred thousand letters was drafted long ago in a quarter that chose comfort over seaworthiness.
Management will cut half its products to save the company; I cut half my belongings to save my time, and only one of us got written up admiringly in the business pages.
We are told the restructuring was chosen, but no designer intended it - a thousand tariff turns and a thousand rivals accumulated, and we read the survivors' account as though it had been planned rather than selected.
Board members expressed profound regret at the workforce reduction, and they were sincere in the way a fox is sincere about the welfare of the henhouse's least productive hens.
Everyone at the works council praised the spirit of cooperation that made agreement possible; no one mentioned a job without an adjective in front of it, and the canteen had already stopped serving the afternoon coffee.
Described as defending the national worker, the tariff taxes every purchaser to shield a producer, and the producer, sheltered for years, now dismisses a tenth of the very workers it was defended for.
Count the record: fifty thousand dismissed, then fifty thousand more, tariffs the stated pretext, competition the stated pretext - the pattern becomes undeniable only when you add the column nobody publishes.
Things that are hateful: a document that calls a hundred thousand departures 'sweeping,' as if the broom felt each bristle leave; things that are elegant: none to be found in these pages.
The announcement concerns market share and productivity, but consider the assembler whose Tuesday morning now begins with a letter explaining, in careful corporate German, that her family's arithmetic must be halved.
They are pulling down half the fence because a cheaper one is being built in the East, and no one can explain what the old gates were made to hold - only that the towns behind them have grown expensive.
In every caravanserai of industry the custom repeats: guild masters first praise the artisans' craftsmanship, then negotiate the terms of their departure - here they call it an agreement, in other courts the same transaction needed no such ceremony.
Fine offices say 'restructure'; on the factory floor the same word becomes a second mortgage, a colder house, a lunch skipped so the children eat - the cold keeps no vocabulary.