Volkswagen’s roadmap to digital Sloanism: old and new challenges for organized labour

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Hereby the proposal to be included within the special edition of the IJAMT. Also, the author wishes to be considered for the GERPISA Young Author Prize 2026.
Purpose
The article analyses the restructuring triggered by the BEV transition in one of the world’s largest carmakers and asks two questions: whether it will lead to the emergence of new productive models, and how this transition reshapes the capital–labour relationship. In particular, it focuses on the extent to which emerging productive models are reconfiguring the bargaining power of labour. In recent years, the problems faced by European carmakers have been piling up. On the one hand, the transition is often portrayed as a destroyer of employment, largely because BEVs are composed of significantly fewer components than ICEVs (Hermann et al., 2020). On the other, the success of Chinese carmakers on the BEV market has further exposed the backwardness of the European automobile industry, adding urgency to their transformation to improve competitiveness without putting millions of jobs at risk (Galgóczi, 2025).
Although the challenges associated with BEVs are self-evident, Boyer and Freyssenet’s (2002) theory on productive models emphasized the importance of non-technological factors, such as carmakers’ previous trajectories and the role of institutions, in shaping company responses. Linkng back to these classical GERPISA debates, the article adopts the concept of productive models as a framework to show that transformations imposed by the BEV transition, as novel as they may seem, are heavily reliant on patterns from the past. Applying this concept to Volkswagen’s current restructuring, we show that the strategy adopted to cope with challenges of the BEV transition builds on the company’s previous experience with modular platforms.
The article contributes to debates within GERPISA by demonstrating how the transition may accelerate a shift toward a form of “digital Sloanism,” in which body and platform become highly standardized while diversity is achieved through customized software. This new stage confronts organized labour with risks such as production delocalization and further value chain fragmentation. However, these challenges largely represent an exacerbation of trends that workers and unions have been confronting for decades (Greer & Doellgast, 2007; Greer & Hauptmeier, 2016). Although the findings are primarily based on semi-structured interviews with Volkswagen AG and IG Metall representatives, the article aims to specify the implications of these developments for capital and labour at a more abstract level.
Design
The study follows a case study approach focusing on the Volkswagen Group. Data were collected from multiple sources of evidence (Yin, 2018), including an analysis of the group’s annual reports, semi-structured interviews with Volkswagen AG representatives (n = 4) and IG Metall representatives (n = 14), and several visits to six West German factories. These factories were among the first to be adapted to the “productive model in the making,” providing insights into the continuities and changes associated with its implementation.
Findings
Following Volkswagen’s shift from a Fordist to a Sloanist productive model, the company’s trajectory has been characterized by increasing platformization and modularization. Platformization refers to the introduction of standardized vehicle platforms for models with the same dimensions, while modularization refers to the design of components as modules that can be used across different models/brands within the Group. To enable the company’s profitable entry into new segments, the company combined both these techniques by replacing multiple standardized platforms with one scalable modular platform (MQB). In the productive organization, the introduction of the MQB has led to a standardization of operations across the factories integrated within the carmaker’s production network: during the period 2012-2022, all but one generalist vehicle assembly plant in Europe have become what will be referred to as “MQB Factory”. Although the loss of platform specialization provides headquarters with greater flexibility to assign and shift production across its network, for plants and worker representatives this development increases the risk of production being relocated if output falls below certain productivity and efficiency thresholds.
Building on these earlier developments, newer generations of the Group’s BEVs have been developed on the same electric modular platform (MEB). The reduced complexity of the MEB has resulted in operations in “MEB factories” being characterized by a higher degree of automation and standardization, thereby exacerbating the risk of production being relocated to other sites. The recently announced Scalable Systems Platform (SSP), a more scalable, software-oriented modular platform than the MEB, represents the culmination of these developments. In addition, contrary to the company’s previous focus on vertical disintegration, the internalization of software development (Cariad) and battery cell production (PowerCo) has increased Volkswagen’s degree of vertical integration. However, the spatial distribution and nature of these new components differ substantially from ICE and gearbox production: while software development is oriented toward a globalized, “in-the-cloud” form of work, battery cell production encourages greater regionalization. The vertical integration of these new “core competences” has also led to the recruitment of new profiles, and this cross-sectoral fragmentation of the productive model further constrains labour’s possibilities for centralizing collective bargaining.
Theoretical and practical implications
The article not only underlines the continued relevance of the concept of productive models by applying it to the BEV transition but also (re)centralizes the question on how productive transformations impact the capital-labour relationship. It will demonstrate how as part of this roadmap to “digital Sloanism” the company uses the standardization of the vehicles as a “technological fix” to extract concessions. As such, it sheds new light on the recent widely commented collective agreement with IG Metall and Volkswagen from 2024 and outlines the challenges associated with the forthcoming transformation of MEB factories for worker representatives within (semi)peripheral regions of the carmaker’s production network (Spain, Portugal, Chez Republic, etc.). Although these challenges are certainly not new, the BEV transition will further exacerbate the intra-company competition for the allocation of production and investment. Together with a chancing composition of the workforce, the article concludes that the roadmap towards “digital Sloanism” will further undermine union bargaining power. This underscores the need for unions to adapt to the BEV era.