

Scania has revealed that it will have to make significant reductions in the size of its global workforce citing the serious reduction in demand for its products as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
Scania president and CEO Henrik Henriksson announced the news on Monday (1 June), revealing his estimate that the company currently has 5,000 more staff than needed. He said “Our assessment is that it will take long before market demand reaches pre-crisis levels and we therefore need to adapt the organisation to the new situation already this year. These will be company-wide measures and formal notices of redundancies are not excluded. The measures also include parts of Scania that normally are not impacted by short term changes in production volume.”
His statement highlighted a review of 1,000 head office white-collar jobs, an excess of staff capacity in the sales and service operation, and a reduction in R&D activity. The use of consultants was mentioned as an area of potential cost saving.
The employee representative on the Board of Directors, Lisa Lorentzon added “As always at Scania, we will strive to minimise the effects for our employees, also in these difficult times. Among the white-collar unions, we fully advocate the continued disengagement of consultants. This requires transferring needed competence and skills to Scania’s permanent staff - which is part of our local collective agreement - in order to secure the company’s long-term survival.”
At the time of writing, Scania (Great Britain) had been unable to comment on how the UK workforce would be affected.