Moviela

I am afraid I do. IG Metall is the largest union anywhere and they sport 275,000 Turk and Kurdish members. The chief steward at Mercedes-Benz is a Turk and tells me that about 10% of the workers at Sindelfingen are Turks and mostly perform low wage assembly jobs. The situation is the same at VW group too.

Audi at Ingolstadt has about 32K workers and 3500 are Turks that did the heavy lifting low pay job of assembling your A4.

These workers are all permitted to live and work in Germany.

Interesting though is that often public building contracts shut out legal residents and unions by hiring contractors that use illegal workers from former Eastern Block countries because wages are lower. Go figure a government actually trying to save money for the taxpayer. I hope it catches on here.

need_TQM

Seems as if there is a bit of a disconnect between your two statements? :

and


3,500 out of 32,000 I would not classify as "most". You did say speak Turkish vs. are Turkish, but with the context it I think most would read that as meaning most workers were Turkish.

MonzaA5

So, going by your own statement, 90% of Audi workers are not Turks, yet most of them speak Turkish? Do they teach Turkish as a second language at Audi now?? LOL

Oh yeah, and of course Turks do "all the heavy lifting" while everyone else seats around and drinks beer all day. You seem to be full of wonderful insight

Alphatero

Whoa, you guys have really gotten off the original topic here:

We will assume that as Audi owners/enthusiasts we are happy with the product being turned out of Germany, regardless of the ethnic breakdown of the workforce there.
It seems the quality control in place there is second to none (If you dont feel this way, then the question of Audi re-locating its manufacturing plants is immaterial to you)

The question was, what if Audi relocates to Mexico, as VW already has. Will you continue to buy the product?

And the answer is: gracias, no

sly1

I thought that ethnic\racial stereotypes ended decades ago. After reading this thread, I'll have to rethink my belief.

precinder2

What fantasyland are you living in LOL.

alexjs1

I'll bet Mexican tacos taste a lot better than the ones at Taco Bell.

All those German-built Audis have had spotty (at best) reliability records until recently. And BTW, my German-built VW CC blew an ECU and intake manifold before 36,000 miles. Let's not give the Germans too much credit for build quality simply because they're not a third-world country.

Moviela

I am sorry I was not clear in my statement that assembly workers are Turks. If you have three hours I will explain how they got there, the discrimination they have suffered, and the reasons young Turks consider their fathers Turkish and themselves German.

Of the 30 odd thousand workers in major automobile plant assembly is done by around 10 percent of the staff. As you might know it takes more than one worker to ensure Davud has the proper components at his station when the chassis arrives. There are thousands of administrative workers, even hundreds working in the lunch room. There are designers, engineers, janitors, gardeners, messengers, jockeys, PR, QC, IT, & a CEO.

In the 70's and 80's it was common for many German workers to have a beer at work, and except in hazardous locations (like machine shop and assembly) it was common for people to drink beer on a break. Then in the early eighties first smoking was verboten, and alcohol followed.

Nice of you to observe I have wonderful insight. Thank you.

Sundowner

Possibly true, BUT having owned a 2010 Jetta built in Mexico and being an engineer, I can definitively and without question point out that all seventeen (17) of the warranty visits I had to deal with were human assembly related. Not robot assembly, not subassemblies built in Germany or Belgium, but the stuff they did in Puebla. A wild monkey could have done a better job even on the simple things like plugging in the damn wiring harness connectors.

And while we're on the topic of outsourced planst, ask any older VW owner about the Westmoreland plant, and then ask then if they were ever a VW owner ever again.

Alphatero

I'm sure they do on the way down........it's the way out that's the problem! Been there, done that.

Ahh, we have a vote to outsource to Africa!!