Portugal’s Volkswagen plant production halt will hit upstream suppliers, says union

Palmela’s Volkswagen plant’s production stoppage, set for September, could jeopardise jobs in other companies, the coordinator of the Autoeuropa Industrial Park Workers’ Committees, Daniel Bernardino, told EURACTIV’s partner Lusa on Tuesday.

“The impact will be quite significant on many of the suppliers,” Autoeuropa Industrial Park coordinator Daniel Bernardino told Lusa on Tuesday, convinced that “temporary and contract workers, who are the most vulnerable, could be the most affected by the production stoppage at the Palmela car plant.”

According to Daniel Bernardino, unofficial information passed on to the Industrial Park’s Coordination Committee suggests the production stoppage at Autoeuropa could start on 11 September and last between two and six weeks.

The Autoeuropa car plant in Palmela, in the district of Setúbal, announced on Monday that it will suspend production from the first fortnight of September due to a shortage of parts from a supplier severely affected by the August floods in Slovenia.

The company guarantees, however, that the Volkswagen Group is not only providing technical support to the Slovenian supplier to restart production but also working to find alternatives with other suppliers to return production to normal at the affected plants as soon as possible.

The Autoeuropa car plant, with around 5,000 workers, produced 231,100 cars last year, around 71 per cent of the vehicles produced in Portugal in 2022.

(Gualter Ribeiro | Lusa.pt, edited by Maria de Deus Rodrigues)