Toyota is bad for America!
Last week Sen. Obama launched a broadside on Detroit automakers arguing that the lagging fortunes of US automakers were the result of their failure to "answer the rising global demand for fuel-efficient cars."
The problem is that Sen. Obama has missed the secret to Toyota's success.
An industrial relations model that treats workers like machines, and has pursued a union evasion strategy employing permatemps and wage parity to reduce the incentive to unionize.
But Toyota worker's wages are set to drop, if Toyota has it's way.
In February of this year, an internal memo detailing Toyota plans to slash wages in their North American plants was leaked to the media. Shockingly, the plan appears to call for Toyota to reduce worker pay by more than half.
The company acknowledged that the documents supplied to the Free Press were authentic.
In a memo to workers at the plant after the report was circulated, Toyota noted that workers at Georgetown earned $3 an hour more than the U.S. auto industry standard. The Free Press reported last week the workers averaged $30 an hour, including bonuses.
Currently, the median for comparable manufacturing jobs in Kentucky -- half earn more, half earn less -- is $12.64, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.
Toyota's strategy resembles what Hyundai Motor Co. uses at its plant in Montgomery, Ala. Assembly workers there make $14 an hour, about half the wages, bonuses and benefits of Toyota, Honda, Nissan and Detroit's automakers. But Hyundai's wages still are considerably higher than for comparable Alabama jobs, which pay $10.79 an hour.
"Our challenge will be how to educate team members and managers about our condition, so that they can understand and accept change," Sudo said in the report.
And it's not just about wage reductions. James Parks over at the AFL-CIO blog reports that Toyota is "dissappearing" workers in order to replace long time workers with permatemps with much lower wages and largely without health benefits.
That's right.
They fired workers because they were injured on the job. That whole "satanic mills" thing seems to be on the rebound with global corporate elites.
...workers say the company, which is nonunion, is firing employees who are injured at work. In addition, full-time workers are being replaced with temporary workers who are paid half what regular team members earn and have little or no health insurance, workers say.
At the town hall meeting, Tim Unger, an 18-year veteran Toyota worker, said he's noticed that some long-time workers have "disappeared" from the plant after they were hurt on the job--victims of Toyota's quest for improved efficiency. Says Unger:
Shoulders would wear out, wrists would require surgery and back
and hands started to fail. It seemed as if the good people who
contributed to the success of Toyota were being used up and
disposed of like garbage.
Earlier this year Toyota overtook GM as the world's largest automaker, yet Toyota workers in Kentucky, Indiana, and California are having their hard work rewarded by being replaced by permatemp workers. Is this really the industrial relations model we want dominating the auto industry?
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