Klaus Franz (union official)
Klaus Franz (born April 4, 1952 in Stuttgart - Bad Cannstatt ) was Chairman of the General Works Council and Deputy Chairman of the Supervisory Board at Opel until February 2012 .
Life
After attending school with a secondary school certificate (1959–1970), he completed an apprenticeship as a druggist (1970–73).
In 1975, Franz started as a car painter at Opel Rüsselsheim. In 1981 he was elected to the works council there. In 2000 he was elected chairman of the works council.
In addition to his professional activity, he obtained an external degree as a social worker at the Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences in 1994 .
Franz is a member of IG Metall and the Hessian tariff commission. As a non-party , he feels connected to the Greens . He sees himself as a “manager from below”. According to the Financial Times Deutschland , many of the employees consider him “the secret ruler of the group. Because of the frequently changing managers, Franz has become something like the face of the company. The good contacts he has with the management are a thorn in the side of some of the workforce. They call him the ' co-manager of the workers' bank'. ”He himself does not find the term co-manager a dirty word. In 2005, Franz signed a Europe-wide agreement with which 9,000 jobs and thus every third job in the German plants were cut. Up until then, this was the largest staff reduction in Opel's history.
In the process of the failed separation of the German Adam Opel GmbH from General Motors , Franz had taken on an active and media-present role and publicly showed great sympathy for the entry of the supplier Magna.
In the works council election in 2010, the IG Metall list at the Rüsselsheim plant that he cited received 86.6 percent of the votes, the best result since the Opel works council was founded in 1945.
Since the end of 2011, when he started the non-working period of his partial retirement, he left the works council at Opel. Successor is Wolfgang Schäfer-Klug.
In August 2013 he started his own business as a management consultant.
In January 2017 he published the book: "Rescuing Opel from Insolvency - The Example of Co-Determination in Practice".
Private
He is married and has two grown sons.
Web links
- Web presence of the communication consulting company "Forum Urbanum" operated by Klaus Franz together with Dagmar Eichhorn-Franz
- Where silence would have been gold. In: The South German.
- The idiosyncratic makes co-determination socially acceptable in Detroit. In: Frankfurter Rundschau.
- Petitioner with calculation. In: The time.
- Opel rescue - go back to work without fear. In: Spiegel online.
literature
- Klaus Franz. The co-manager. In: Andreas Drinkuth: A social elite. 20 portraits. Schüren, Marburg 2010, ISBN 978-3-89472-230-2 , pp. 68-74.
Individual evidence
- ^ A b Klaus Franz: Klaus Franz, Opel, Communication | forum urbanum . In: forum-urbanum.de . 2017 [last update]. Retrieved March 16, 2017.
- ^ Klaus Franz - works council at the wheel. ( Memento from March 13, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) In: Financial Times Germany. November 18, 2008.
- ^ Opel works council chief Klaus Franz: The co-manager. In: faz.net.
- ^ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. March 11, 2010, p. 17.
- ↑ Ex-Opel works council boss Klaus Franz advises companies. In: Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung. August 9, 2013.
- ↑ Communication advice , restructuring & employee representation. Retrieved February 12, 2017 .
- ^ Klaus Franz: Rescuing Opel from bankruptcy. The example of active participation. Verlag im Bücherhaus, Ginsheim-Gustavsburg 2017, ISBN 978-3-923921-04-1 .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Franz, Klaus |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German trade union official, works council chairman and deputy chairman of the supervisory board of Adam Opel GmbH |
| DATE OF BIRTH | April 4th 1952 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Stuttgart - Bad Cannstatt |