nokia low wages? the workers are paying for the building they work in

Aren’t there Romanians and other populations pouring into places like Germany and Italy to find work (taking jobs…?)

Aren’t there more than a few German companies that have moved out of Germany? Have they called for a boycott of the companies that have moved out of their own country? My German car was built in Brazil. I think my Adidas were too. I bet more than a few people drive Volkswagens and wear Adidas in Germany quite regularly still. Shouldn’t this be more insulting to the German population than for a foreign guest moving along with business?

Yes- it is absolutely a shame that Nokia has announced plans to close the plant, but such is business. Nokia is a guess in Germany, and they have several more outfits in Germany still- should they take this as a sign that they’ve outstayed their welcome, pack everything up?

I understand that Nokia may have handled the situation poorly (six months notice… severance pay?) but honestly- this is just a very bad reaction and will only make a bad situation worse. This just does not seem like the way to treat a guest in your country.

These videos are something else. What handset maker will they choose to use now…?

And the media buys it.

Nokias pointless decision to save some small bucks destroys the life of people who worked for them!

Also wages are only 4.2 percent of nokias total production costs. Therefore lowering the wages will result in no really significant reduction of costs. Nokia also is very well doing, makes lots of profits and has not even the slightest need to cut on costs.

The truth: The machines in the bochum branch are outdated because nokia did no modernization for a very long time. Now they would need to invest money and they decided to invest the money in romania to have slightly less production costs. As said, not really significant but nethertheless noticable.

So saying that the labor costs in germany are the reason for closing the bochum branch is nothing but a big fat lie. And how they treated their workers is to be ashamed of, they even got bonuses at the end of the year because they did so well. They also got no official information about closing down the branch but got the news from public broadcast. This is a arrogant and barbarous of treating your employees.

Currently germany is on number 5 of nokias biggest selling markest (behind China, USA, India and UK). I guess it was the longest time.

Congratulations nokia, for very marginal savings you have destroyed one of your biggest markets. This is not a good business move but downright dumb.

I just don’t see how smashing a thousand dollars worth of communicators will help. For one, Nokia already made its profit on those devices, and I am sure that the “I need a hammer to break this” will be a couple of PR points to Nokia if presented out of context. A donation to some poor kids would have been preferable.

On the other side, I can’t say that I am looking forward to buying an expensive phone that has a “Made in Romania” tag on it, as compared to “Made in Germany”. Oh well, can’t be worse than “Made Anywhere else”.

Arguing that labor and operation in Romania isn’t cheaper than in Germany is pointless. Anyone one with a slight sense of current economy knows that. In western Europe everything is more costly; be it wages or the infrastructure costs (health care, taxes, electricity, etc).

Of course it’s always disappointing when a factories and offices get shut down and people find themselves unemployed but there are always other work to do. Western European countries have to evolve and become more service oriented and focus on other areas than manufacturing. (Nokia still has a big R&D site in Ulm and likely a lot of the Bochum R&D people is offered a chance to move there)

oh, and the Bochum site is going to run for another 6 months or so. I’d say that’s pretty damn good. Sometimes these things come really out of the blue and people are given practically no time to adjust. Several months is more than enough to get your stuff in order and prepare to find another work.

This is not the old days anymore where people spend their whole working life in a single job. And others already said a lot of German companies already bailed out from Bochum area (Adidas among them) so it’s not like Nokia is the first one. Even German car makers mostly assemble theirs cars outside of Germany these days.

Oh and about the video of the guy destroying his communicators: You can clearly see that at least one of the devices was working before he hammered on it.

Sorry, but you can’t treat people like this.

Not Motorola.
Not LGE.
Not Samsung.
Only SonyEricsson still has an outsourced plant … in Estonia.

This is pathetic German politician posturing over their inability to make labour costs low.

I can totally see Nokia moving to Vietnam in the future, there economy is booming and they’re investing into education all the while being dirt cheap.

But anyway, stop whining Krauts..This is the way business goes today…east. I wonder why Nokia didn’t choose to go even further east..

I bet the people are pissed off because they didn’t get any advanced notice, this just happened out of the blue really.