It’s a special place for Tekin Nasikkol: The IG Metall trade union has invited to a press conference in the ThyssenKrupp steel division’s training center in Duisburg. Nasikkol sits on the podium, he heads the works council of this division and the group works council of the parent company Thyssenkrupp. This makes the 55-year-old one of the most powerful employee representatives in Germany. But in this room of the educational center Nasikkol sat as a young man. “I started my apprenticeship here,” he says. Nasikkol has Learned to be a fusion welder in the mid-1980s.
Nevertheless, Nasikkol was not nostalgically mild on Wednesday. The trade unionist called for more political support for the green conversion of steel production. And he warned the new Thyssenkrupp boss Miguel Ángel López Borrego that there should be no redundancies in the planned savings program for the MDax company: “We are clearly drawing red lines for the entire group,” said Nasikkol.
The Essen-based conglomerate not only earns its money with steel, but also as an automotive supplier, machine builder, submarine manufacturer and materials dealer. López has been leading the company and its 96,000 employees worldwide since June; he succeeds the retired Martina Merz. When the quarterly figures were presented in August, the German-Spaniard resigned directly a new “performance program” at. When asked, he did not explicitly rule out redundancies for operational reasons, which led to unrest among the workforce. Especially since Thyssenkrupp has already cut 11,000 jobs in the past few years. Next Wednesday, the former Siemens manager López wants to present the program called “Apex” – Latin for tip – to the supervisory board, after which the implementation will start.
In an e-mail to the employees, the group management explains which areas are affected. Accordingly, the topics of material costs, sales, personnel and organization, the business models and the “performance culture” are examined. That sounds like little is left out. But the pressure is great according to the top management: “Despite the efforts made in the change process in recent years, we have not achieved the financial goals that we set ourselves and communicated to the capital market in 2021, and we cannot ‘continue like this’ perform,” the email reads. The company must “stop living off the substance”.
The top manager knows the works council well
López also named a “Chief Transformation Officer” to oversee the program. Here, of all things, his choice was noticed Cetin Nazikkol, the one year older brother of the works council chairman Tekin Nasikkol. The trade unionist writes his Turkish surname with an “s” because he has Germanized it. Cetin Nazikkol is currently top manager for Thyssenkrupp in Dubai. In an internally circulated interview, the doctor of chemistry says that López’s request surprised him at first because he is not a reorganizer or a controller. In his career he has been more concerned with business development and sales: “I would certainly not be the ideal person for a short-term savings program.” But the main aim of the planned program is to get the group back on the road to success in the medium and long term.
Cetin Nazikkol emphasized in the conversation that he and his brother Tekin would not work against each other: After all, it is not a question of downsizing, but a transformation program. “We want to make Thyssenkrupp better in the long term.” The works council is also interested in this. The controversial program is now in the hands of two powerful brothers.