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Camaraderie and solidarity at Opel in Bochum. Bochum’s Opel workers with a transnational background share their recollections.

Up until the Oder-Neisse border treaty was concluded in 1990, migrants from Poland, particularly from the border region of the Upper Silesia that was once German, made up the largest group of emigrants in the Ruhr area. To this day, their living and working environments move in the transnational space between integration into everyday work and life in Germany, the deep cultural connection to their home region of Upper Silesia and their dominant socialisation in Poland. For centuries, their nationality – whether German or Pole – was merely the result of external attributions and a changing entry in passport documents. In fact, their identities were actually transnational in nature. This understanding of transnational spaces and the identities that developed within them as a bundle of phenomena resulting from social interactions across national state borders is critical to the characterisation of employees with cross-border Polish-German roots at Opel Bochum.

Four former Opel employees from Bochum, each with a transnational background, were interviewed for this article. Those questioned were all born in Upper Silesia, some also grew up there, and they now live in Bochum and its surrounds.

Administration building "Werk I", Bochum

Andreas also noticed that the average age of the employees at the Opel plant in Gliwice was considerably less than that of the Opel workers in Bochum. Also, the workers there were expected to do much more work and work that was physically much more demanding. Overall, those interviewees who had taken part in the international exchange remembered it very positively. Contact details had also been swapped sporadically between Polish and German participants. Today, however – seven years after the plant closed in Bochum – the interviewees no longer have any contact with the Polish participants.

The Opel workers interviewed vividly remember the period before Opel closed in Bochum. On the one hand, they remember the strong solidarity of the Bochum Opel workers, on the other hand they also express their disappointment that there was little to no international solidarity during the ten-year fight. According to the statements made by the Bochum Opel workers who were interviewed, apart from sending formal letters of solidarity, notably their Polish colleagues from the Opel site did not reach out to their colleagues in Bochum. Instead, the impression was formed that, particularly at this time of deep crisis within the General Motors Group, each facility, and each plant with its employees were thinking about themselves and about their own preservation. However, this was not just the case at the Polish facility; it was also happening at other national and other European facilities as well:

“They were happy that we had closed because that secured their chances of survival. One plant was played off against another. From a human perspective, they perhaps thought ‘what a shame’, but secretly they were happy that we closed because it meant they could continue to produce. They were happy in England, in Rüsselsheim or wherever. Everyone looks to themselves first to make sure that they’re OK. Your own plant is the important one, that that’s the one that is preserved.” (Andreas Gilner)

Andreas Gilner is by no means the only one to express this opinion:

“Well, I would say that there wasn’t any solidarity at all. Something was always being professed, but you knew very well that each site was fighting for itself. And it doesn't matter what was professed, basically everyone protects their own backside.” (Johannes Nowak)

Johannes Nowak even knew the second chair of the works council at the Opel plant in Gliwice personally and, during the period of tough confrontations around the closure of the Bochum plant, had spoken to him about possible support from the workforce in Gliwice. He had felt supported by him personally but on the whole he summarised by saying:

“We didn’t experience any proper solidarity from any plant really. We didn’t get it from the Austrians or the Rüsselsheimers. It’s true that various committees were set up, but at the end it’s all about the survival of your own plant. Everyone wants to keep their job and wants it to continue.”

Any expectation that a transnational solidarity could have developed between the groups of workers at the Opel plants in Bochum and Gliwice based on their shared German-Polish heritage disappeared under the painful experience of the open competition between the European Opel facilities, which ultimately undermined the tentative beginnings of a cross-border European collaboration that had started in 2007:

“It's understandable. Our colleagues in Gliwice had been tormented for decades. We were reproached for how cheap they are in Gliwice and how expensive we are in Bochum and our colleagues in Gliwice were reproached for how cheap they are in the Ukraine. It’s a spiral. So, when it’s a question of your own future, I do understand the individual plants.” (Eduard Popanda)