Stephanie Baker, Naomi Kresge and Christoph Rauwald

The clan’s disengagement dates to 1972. After an internecine struggle over the company’s direction that culminated in what family members call a “group therapy session” at the Zell farmhouse with a professional mediator, they agreed to hand management to outsiders. And while the Porsches have had ties to VW since the 1930s, they only stumbled into control less than a decade ago — the counterintuitive denouement of a failed bid by Porsche to take over its bigger rival.

With the family AWOL, the void has been filled by VW’s powerful unions. Even before the crisis, labor had an unusually strong voice, holding half of the 20 seats on VW’s supervisory board and typically finding allies occupying the two seats controlled by the state of Lower Saxony, VW’s second-largest shareholder. Since the crisis, Bernd Osterloh, Volkswagen’s burly, combative union boss, has gone on the offensive with a message for the executive suite: This is your mess, and the workers aren’t going to foot the bill.