German truck producer MAN AG will reduce its production in the first half of 2009 by 45% instead of by 30% as initially planned, corporate insiders said. MAN has never faced a crisis of this scale, an unnamed employee commented. What compounded the problems was the eastern European market, which has recently come to a complete standstill.
MAN saw eastern Europe as having considerable potential in the past years and set up a truck plant in Krakow, Poland, in the autumn of 2007. The regulations in Poland do not allow adjustments of production through timesheets, so MAN laid off 150 workers at the Krakow production site last year and plans massive job cuts, the insiders claimed.
The company is in talks with Polish governmental representatives over the possibility to introduce short-time work at the plant.
Abstracted from an original article in Die Welt
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