Volkswagen announced it will cut up to 100,000 jobs — roughly one out of every ten workers at the company — and close or shrink several factories. The company's board will vote on this plan on July 9. This is a massive change that happened very quickly; just weeks earlier, the company was discussing cuts of roughly half this size.

The union IG Metall, workers at VW plants, and the government of Lower Saxony (a German state that owns a piece of Volkswagen) have all said they will fight against these cuts. The union is organizing protests at all Volkswagen factories when the board meets.

Lower Saxony's involvement matters more than it might seem. In Germany, state governments and worker unions have legal power to block big company decisions — this is called codetermination, and it is built into how many large German companies work. So any plan this big needs approval not just from the company's leadership, but also from workers' representatives and the state government.

This is not just a Volkswagen problem. Germany's car industry directly and indirectly employs about 3 million people across Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and thousands of smaller companies that supply parts. Across Europe, car factories can produce far more vehicles than anyone actually wants to buy — about 5 million more cars per year than the market demands. That is like having 35 huge factories sitting empty or barely running.

Why is this happening? European car companies built all these factories based on the assumption that car sales would keep growing steadily. They also expected electric vehicles to take over the market slowly. But Chinese car makers have built massive factories for electric cars and are selling them around the world faster and cheaper than European companies expected. Now European car makers have too much factory space and not enough customers.

The head of Germany's car industry association suggested something surprising: maybe some German car factories should be sold to foreign companies if that would save jobs. This idea would have seemed impossible to say out loud just a few years ago. When an industry leader talks like this, it signals they think the problem is extremely serious.

It is hard to know if this suggestion is genuine or a negotiating tactic to push the German government for help. Either way, it shows how much pressure the industry is under.

The board meeting on July 9 will probably not be the final say on the cuts. German law gives workers and the state government real power in these decisions. A more realistic outcome is that the company and the unions will negotiate a plan that spreads job losses over several years rather than doing all the cuts at once. The bigger question — whether German car companies stay German-owned or end up controlled by foreign companies — will not be answered this week, but the conversation itself has changed.