It looks like VDL Nedcar management in Born and the unions buried the hatchet after they reached an agreement on Tuesday evening on a substantially better social plan for the 3 950 people in the car factory who will probably lose their job. The employees, who struck for eight days, voted on Thursday in favor of the deal with 90%, and 10% opposed.

That deal provides a severance pay of the legal one-third of a month’s salary per year of service, multiplied by 1.9 for those working for 15 years or less at Nedcar and 2.9 for those working already longer. According to the unions, this represents a 20% better deal than the original social plan drafted in 2021.

Doing overtime for 6 000 cars

The family-owned VDL Group will help its employees find a new job externally in the region or – only on request of the people themselves – elsewhere within the group’s companies.

To compensate for the lost production during the strike, the workers must catch up for the assembly of about 6  000 cars by doing overtime. The latter was a strict requirement of BMW and VDL.

1 800 dismissals to start

Currently, 3 950 people work at Nedcar. Of them, 1 000 permanent and 800 temporary workers will lose their jobs as of 1 November, VDL announced last week. This includes production employees and people in supporting services.

But more job losses are expected later if VDL fails to find new car factory contracts. But as setting up production of new models could take years of preparation, the unions don’t believe this will happen anymore.

Still looking for clients

In a statement, the VDL management explained earlier that it is still looking for other clients in the automotive business but that it didn’t work out yet. “We’ve done our utmost to ensure production,” says VDL director John van Soerland, “but until now, we didn’t succeed. Time has been too short in a very turbulent automotive environment to achieve this. This makes us very unhappy, and we apologize to the workers.”

The unions consulted the workers on the floor on Thursday, saying they achieved the ‘optimal result’ in the negotiations. VDL management said it was anticipating the results of the vote with confidence, convinced the unions will explain the deal in the best possible way. Eventually, 90 percent of the workers approved the deal.