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From Nora Miethke
The mayor of Freiberg, Sven Krüger, is confident that the 400 employees of Meyer Burger will quickly find a new job again. "There are 340 companies in Freiberg that pay trade tax, all of which are desperately looking for workers," said Krüger on the fringes of a visit by Economics Minister Martin Dulig to the company Freiberger Compound Materials last week.
The Swiss company Meyer Burger announced a week ago that the approximately 500 employees in Freiberg had been made redundant. More than 400 people are losing their jobs. The others have been offered contracts in other areas. This was preceded by Federal Finance Minister Christian Lindner's (FDP) rejection of the so-called resilience bonus, which was intended to support manufacturers under pressure in Europe in competition with highly subsidized competitors from China. Chinese solar modules at dumping prices are currently flooding the European market. Meyer Burger had made the future of production in Freiberg dependent on this support.
Getting people back into jobs quickly
Sven Krüger announced that Meyer Burger, together with the city's economic development agency, would be organizing a job fair for the affected employees in the Festsaal on 29 April from 10 am to 1 pm. Experience with Solarworld, which finally filed for insolvency in 2018, has shown that those affected quickly find a new job. "The 1,300 employees at Solarworld were all back in work after six months," said Krüger.
Nevertheless, he believes that the German government's decision not to support the solar industry is wrong and will have its revenge. "The solar industry in eastern Germany has been sent into insolvency twice. It won't come back a third time," he says.
