Volkswagen Group, Europe’s industrial behemoth, is bracing for a radical reshaping of its empire. By 2028, it intends to slash costs by 20 percent across all brands—a figure that reads less like corporate prudence and more like the prelude to upheaval.

The pressures are real: sagging demand in China, the company’s largest market, and escalating trade conflicts with the United States threaten its bottom line. Yet the numbers tell only part of the story.

Last year, Germany’s factories—Wolfsburg, Emden, Zwickau, Hanover—failed to hit internal efficiency and cost targets, victims of sprawling ambitions: dual development of combustion and electric engines, relentless software investments.

The board’s response is a “massive” savings plan, the details of which remain shrouded, with plant closures looming like specters over workers already facing 35,000 future job cuts under a labor agreement designed to make the transition appear humane.

Volkswagen’s leadership portrays this as prudent stewardship, a defense against geopolitical storms. But beneath the rhetoric lies a familiar pattern:

Human labor subordinated to capital, efficiency sanctified over community, and the machinery of corporate power remade with little regard for those who inhabit the shadow of the assembly line.

The March 10 interim update will likely be framed as triumph—but the moral cost, as always, is invisible.