Steelworkers in Duisburg are being subjected to an unprecedented assault on their livelihoods\u2014 planned, organised and enforced by the IG Metall union bureaucracy.<\/p>\n
Thousands of jobs are being cut at Thyssenkrupp. At H\u00fcttenwerke Krupp Mannesmann (HKM), IG Metall, the works council and management of Salzgitter Stahl AG have sealed the destruction of almost 2,000 of 3,000 jobs by signing a \u201csocial collective agreement.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Thyssenkrupp works council chairman Tekin Nasikkol (left), Left Party politician Bodo Ramelow and HKM works council member and Left Party Bundestag deputy Mirze Edis (far right) at a steel workers\u2019 demonstration in Berlin on June 12, 2026<\/p>\n
Gerhard Erdmann, chief executive of the Steel Employers\u2019 Association and HKM\u2019s chief financial officer until 2023, told the local press on Monday: \u201cWhat is coming now is worse than Rheinhausen.\u201d<\/p>\n
By \u201cRheinhausen,\u201d Erdmann is referring to the closure of the Krupp steelworks in the Duisburg district of Rheinhausen, which triggered the longest industrial dispute in the history of then West Germany. When the Krupp corporation announced the closure of the steel plant in 1987, it still employed 6,300 workers. At that time, 200,000 people still worked in the West German steel industry. The Rheinhausen workforce responded by occupying the plant and staging numerous protests and demonstrations that drew in the entire region.<\/p>\n
Even then, the IG Metall executive board in Frankfurt had long since agreed to the job cuts in the steel industry, including Rheinhausen. The union leadership put a brave face on it. They pretended to be fighting alongside the workforce, only to organise the sell-out of the Krupp workers behind their backs.<\/p>\n
Today, 80,000 jobs remain in the German steel industry, and at least 7,000 of them are being destroyed in Duisburg alone. And what are the IG Metall apparatus and its works council representatives doing? They are trying to sell this jobs massacre as a great success and even as a measure to secure jobs. In a joint press statement, IG Metall and the HKM works council describe the restructuring of the company as \u201ca courageous entrepreneurial decision of great importance for industrial policy in Duisburg, North Rhine-Westphalia and Germany as a steel production location.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is not a wind-down, this is an investment. This is the creation of an industrial future,\u201d enthuses Thomas Hay, IG Metall organisational secretary and deputy chairman of the HKM supervisory board. He continues: \u201cAt a time when many people feel that everything industrial in Germany is collapsing, this decision is a powerful counter-example.\u201d He accuses those who feel this way of deceiving themselves. \u201cOften the feeling is bleaker than the reality. At HKM, we are now seeing that courageous decisions can change reality. That makes us very happy.\u201d<\/p>\n
While union apparatchik Hay, from the vantage of his well-paid union post, rejoices over the destruction of jobs and the social gains of earlier generations, IG Metall evidently senses that such a brazen and cynical distortion of the facts could ignite anger and outrage.<\/p>\n Preemptively, Karsten Kaus, head of the IG Metall Duisburg-Dinslaken district office, declares: \u201cAnyone who now speaks only of job cuts is falling far short of the mark.\u201d For the alternative to this \u201ccontinuation plan,\u201d he says, would in the worst case have been outright closure. This is the logic of the corporation\u2019s blackmail: either you accept that two-thirds of the workforce are thrown out onto the street, or we shut the plant down completely. This is not the language of a workers\u2019 organisation, but of an accomplice of management.<\/p>\n The brutal cuts at HKM are the result of a years-long process, in the course of which IG Metall and the HKM works council have not lifted a finger to defend jobs but actively demobilised the workforce\u2019s resistance with impotent warning strikes and protest actions.<\/p>\n Ever since a closure of HKM was first put up for discussion four years ago, IG Metall has acted as an extended arm of the corporation. Instead of mobilising workers at HKM, at Thyssenkrupp\u2014where a total of\u00a011,000 jobs are likewise being destroyed<\/a>\u00a0through a \u201csocial collective agreement\u201d\u2014and across heavy industry as a whole for joint strikes and demonstrating their enormous power, they have ensured that workers\u2019 resistance remained as ineffective as possible.<\/p>\n In April 2025, when Thyssenkrupp announced the corporation would no longer source steel from HKM after 2032, Kaus proclaimed capitulation was the only option. One had to \u201cprepare for the worst\u2014namely, closure.\u201d Since then, the union has been peddling the proposal that the sale or takeover of HKM would \u201csave\u201d jobs. This was flanked by occasional protests and warning strikes, which served as safety valves for the workforce\u2019s anger.<\/p>\n \u201cWe don\u2019t want to strike,\u201d shop stewards\u2019 committee head Dengel called out to the assembled workers at a protest rally outside HKM in early February, thereby summing up the essential concern of the IG Metall apparatus in a single sentence.<\/p>\n When it became known in February this year that Thyssenkrupp and Salzgitter AG had agreed on the key terms for a full takeover of HKM by Salzgitter, leading IG Metall representatives expressed their enthusiasm, among them North Rhine-Westphalia district leader Knut Giesler, the head of IG Metall Duisburg-Dinslaken, Karsten Kaus and HKM shop stewards\u2019 committee head Philipp Dengel.<\/p>\n Marco Gasse, chairman of the HKM works council, declared: \u201cFor the moment, we are simply happy. It is now up to us as the works council to shape the transition fairly.\u201d Yet Salzgitter chief executive Gunnar Groebler had made clear from the outset that he planned to maintain steel production with only 1,000 of the 3,000 employees.<\/p>\n Questions about this article? Ask Socialism AI<\/p>\n Some details of this \u201cfair transition,\u201d in which IG Metall has played a decisive role, have been known since mid-July. At the centre of the \u201csocial collective agreement\u201d is a massive job cull. Of the roughly 3,000 permanent staff and agency workers currently employed, around 1,800, more than half, will be laid off by June 30, 2029. Five hundred are to \u201cleave voluntarily\u201d by October 1 this year. On that date, one of the two remaining blast furnaces at the plant is to be taken out of operation. The second blast furnace is then to be replaced by an electric arc furnace in mid-2029 which will require little more than 1,000 employees to operate.<\/p>\n The restructuring is being touted under the slogan of \u201cgreen\u201d steel production. But this is not being pursued in the interest of the climate or of workers; rather, it serves as a lever to close plants, reduce workforces and secure profits amid an intensifying trade and economic war.<\/p>\n The works council and the union are supported by the Left Party. Its industrial policy parliamentary spokesman in the Bundestag, Mirze Edis, who is simultaneously a member of the HKM works council, launched into a hymn of praise for everyone involved after the takeover by Salzgitter was announced. Completely unabashed, he stated that he personally was \u201chappy to have contributed to this success through numerous conversations with company chief executives.\u201d<\/p>\n In the name of the Left Party\u2019s Bundestag group, he expressed his thanks not only to the so-called \u201cemployee representatives\u201d but also to the Salzgitter corporation, \u201cwhich has taken on responsibility not only for HKM but has also stood up for the region [sic!].\u201d Germany needed \u201cmore corporate leaderships of this kind, who also live up to their responsibility towards our regions,\u201d he said. This, he claimed, also helped democracy.<\/p>\n Edis is here openly displaying the role of the Left Party. While the Merz government drives forward its policies of war, brutal social cuts and the conversion of industry to war production at full steam, the Left Party sides with IG Metall, which is organising the cuts, and openly with the corporations drawing their profits from those cuts. By sabotaging the necessary struggle for workers\u2019 interests, the Left Party is not helping democracy but driving voters into the arms of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).<\/p>\n The experiences of recent years make one thing clear: at HKM and across industry as a whole, workers need new organisations of their own. Organisations that will fight uncompromisingly against the corporations\u2019 decades-long attacks, mobilising the full strength of the workers, without whom not a single kilo of steel is produced. The record of the IG Metall apparatus at HKM and elsewhere shows how urgently rank-and-file action committees, controlled by the workers themselves, need to be built.<\/p>\n Anyone unwilling to stand by while IG Metall surrenders job after job\u2014and celebrates the cuts as a success\u2014must act now. Workers can only defend their jobs by taking matters into their own hands, independently of the union apparatus, which has long since stood on the other side of the barricades.<\/p>\n We call on all steelworkers, all employees at HKM, Thyssenkrupp and across the entire industry: build action committees with us, controlled by yourselves, which make no rotten compromises, and which fight for every single job! Get in touch with us. Fill out the form or send a message via\u00a0WhatsApp<\/a>\u00a0to +491633378340.<\/p>\n Subscribe to the IWA-RFC Newsletter<\/p>\n Get email updates on workers\u2019 struggles and a global perspective from the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Steelworkers in Duisburg are being subjected to an unprecedented assault on their livelihoods\u2014 planned, organised and enforced by…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1149380,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5310],"tags":[140580,2000,299,1824,312564,35425,56040,25541,67582],"class_list":["post-1149379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-germany","tag-duisburg","tag-eu","tag-europe","tag-germany","tag-hkm","tag-left-party","tag-plant-closing","tag-steel-industry","tag-thyssenkrupp"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/117097620244472648","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1149379","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1149379"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1149379\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1149380"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1149379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1149379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1149379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/1786767738_447_00320551-90b5-4662-8c01-4280f38c1388.png\"\/)
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