FRANKFURT (MktNews) - The trade union for Bundesbank employees (VdB) Wednesday backed a media report that the German central bank will have to shed 30-40% of its workforce due to upcoming structural reforms, according to a pre-release of German business daily Boersenzeitung's Thursday edition. In its Wednesday edition, Boersenzeitung had reported -- citing unnamed sources -- that the Bundesbank will have to cut its workforce to 10,000 or less from a current 16,000. The job reduction process is to be completed by 2010, the paper said. Neither the Bundesbank nor the German Finance Ministry would comment on the article. Bundesbank President Ernst Welteke -- who also sits on the ECB Governing Council -- has repeatedly said that only a 10% downsizing of the current BBK workforce was needed. VdB Chairman Karl-Heinz Schmidt said in an interview with Boersenzeitung that he has been of the opinion for some time "that some 5,000 jobs will have to be cut in the coming years, regardless which Bundesbank structural reform the legislators will decide upon at the end." He added, that he thought a 30-40% job cut in the coming years was a realistic assessment. The union leader criticized the leadership of the Bundesbank for not discussing the downsizing plans more openly. He warned that Bundesbank employees were currently unsettled by this and that their motivation was suffering. However, it remains unclear when, or in what form, the final Bundesbank reform plan will pass the German legislature. The Bundesrat -- the upper house of parliament representing Germany's 16 state governments -- continues to oppose Finance Minister Hans Eichel's plans to exclude state central bank presidents from the BBK central council and to strip the Bundesbank of its banking supervision role. Eichel aims to create a new, single government agency to supervise all German financial institutions -- banks, brokerage firms, and insurance companies -- but scale back the Bundesbank's involvement in the supervisory process. Welteke and other BBK officials have argued on many occasions that the central bank cannot carry out its role as guardian of the financial system without a bank supervisory role. The ECB has strongly backed this view. Furthermore, the government is currently in the process of fully transferring debt management activities from the Finance Ministry and the Bundesbank to the new semi-private Debt Management Agency. This reform has already become law, because it only needed the approval of the Bundestag -- the lower house of parliament -- where the government can count on a safe majority.