The injunction came the same day. What restarted the plants was twenty hours in a room.
On Friday 19 August 2016, two suppliers stopped sending parts to Volkswagen.
Within days six German plants had gone quiet. Wolfsburg. The gearbox plant at Kassel. Around 28,000 workers were affected. Volkswagen runs just in time, which means the buffer between a delivery and a production line is close to nothing.
The two companies were Car Trim, which makes seat components, and ES Automobilguss, which casts iron parts for gearboxes. Both belong to the Prevent group, controlled by the family of the Bosnian businessman Nijaz Hastor. Between them they are a small fraction of Volkswagen's supplier base.
Volkswagen went to the Landgericht Braunschweig the same day and obtained interim injunctions ordering deliveries to resume. It asked the court to hold the suppliers' executives personally liable.
The line stayed down.
What restarted it was more than twenty hours of negotiation running through the night of 22 to 23 August. Both sides then issued a joint statement and declined to give terms.
What the two sides say happened before that
This part is contested, and both readings are on the record.
Prevent says Volkswagen cancelled development work after the suppliers had already invested, declined to compensate them, and was moving the cost of the emissions crisis down onto its supply base. Volkswagen's position, pursued later in court, is that the delivery stop was unlawful.
Neither reading has been resolved in anything I could read, so I am leaving both standing.
The opening move was a removal
Here is the part I keep coming back to.
The supplier's opening was a removal rather than a demand, and everything that followed happened inside a situation it had already created.
A commercial argument about development costs became, within a day, a question about when six plants restart. The subject changed. Nobody announced the change.
The development costs are a separate argument and it may well be a good one. What the opening did was set what the conversation would be about.
The escalation ladder is visible here, which is rare
Volkswagen's first response was legal. It was fast, it was the same day, and it was within its rights to seek.
The injunction did not put parts on a truck.
A remedy can settle who is right and still leave the line standing still.
What answered the question of when they would build cars again was two sets of people in a room for twenty hours.
Where the power sat
On any organisation chart, Volkswagen holds the power in this relationship. It is one of the largest carmakers in the world, and Car Trim makes seat components.
For a few days, in one narrow place, the alternatives ran out on the larger party.
The supplier appears to have known where that place was before it moved. Finding it took nothing more than knowing, precisely, what the other side could not replace quickly.
That read was available to both parties. One of them acted on it first.
What this does not tell us
The settlement amount was never published. A figure circulates widely and I could not find a source that produced it.
What happened after 2016 I could not establish from anything.
And I could not see the buyer's side of it.
What Volkswagen's own procurement function did in those four days is not in anything I could read. Whether the dependency was known before the Friday, and to whom, is not there either. That would be interesting to know.
This is also one relationship in one industry with a strong dependency structure. Just in time is what made the move work. Where there is inventory, there is time, and the same opening would land differently.
The question I am left with
It is easy to prepare what we want and what we will trade.
The harder question is what we cannot replace quickly, and who already knows it.
Knowing where the dependency sits is one job. Getting that read to the person who decides, while there is still a decision to make, is another. What would it take for that read to arrive before the decision rather than after it?
Be well, Tina
