Industrial giant Siemens under fire over planned job cuts

Saarbruecken — Martin Schulz, the leader of Germany’s centre-left Social Democrats (SPD), on Friday blasted Siemens’s plans to cut 6,900 jobs as "antisocial", his latest salvo in an escalating public dispute with Siemens CE Joe Kaeser. Kaeser had responded to criticism from Schulz in an open letter published by the Handelsblatt newspaper on Thursday, saying his use of "populist and aggressive slogans" could aid the company’s competition. Schulz, whose party agreed on Friday to enter talks with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives about renewing its outgoing coalition government, said he had read Kaeser’s letter but did not plan to respond in kind. "I’m not going to write an open letter, but I am going to repeat what I said — a company that reports profit of €6.3bn and then fires 6,900 people is acting antisocially and not socially," he told the SPD’s youth wing at a conference in the western city of Saarbruecken. Siemens last week said it would cut close to 2% of its global work...

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