SEARCH
Toyota Workers: Company Runs over Our Rights |
|
Toyota touts its success and sells its cars with the slogan “Moving Forward.” But current and former workers at Toyota’s plant in Georgetown, Ky., say the company is “moving forward” with plans to cut pay and replace injured workers with temporary employees, who receive half the pay of full-time workers and few benefits.
“They’re [part-time workers] trying to get a job there,” Cornelia James, a 19-year Georgetown worker, told a workers’ rights board hearing in Georgetown yesterday.
Full-time employment is dangled in front of them like a carrot, and they’re told, any missteps and you’re out.
In a comment posted today on the AFL-CIO Now blog, “warrior,” an 18-year Toyota employee, shares similar experiences:
I am an 18-year “team” member at Toyota in Georgetown. A person who does not work here really has no idea what goes on….I’ve had many friends that have been hurt and have had surgeries only to come back on a different shift and a different area doing a job that was worse than the one they had been hurt on. Toyota will fight tooth and nail to make sure that any injury is not an OSHA recordable. For Toyota, image is everything.
More than 200 people, many of them workers at the Toyota plant, gathered in a building just yards away from Toyota Stadium on the Georgetown College campus for the hearing, sponsored by Kentucky Jobs with Justice. The hearing follows a March 31 town hall forum in Lexington, Ky., where workers voiced some of the same concerns.
Noel Christian Riddell, a 10-year veteran skilled-trades worker, told the workers’ rights board he and another worker were fired after discussing recent media leaks about workers’ pay. The documents indicate Toyota is considering cutting some wages to lower overall expenses.
What was my crime? Knowledge. I will not go quietly.
At yesterday’s hearing, James also said women often are rushed to use the restroom during breaks because there are not enough stalls.
The 10-member workers’ rights board, which includes two state legislators, called for Toyota to:
- Reinstate the fired workers with back pay and seniority.
- Hire temporary workers as permanent employees after 90 days.
- Retain injured workers after their doctors have released them to return to work.
- Provide adequate restroom facilities for all employees.
“We are people of community, and part of our community has said to us that things are not exactly the way they need to be in the work situation at Toyota,” the Rev. John Rausch, coordinator of peace and justice at the Catholic Diocese in Lexington, Ky., and a member of the hearing board, told the Louisville Courier-Journal.
We are not trying to tear Toyota down. We are trying to make it better and have a better partner in community.
Several speakers said the workers need a greater voice in what happens at the plant, which makes Camrys, Avalons and Solaras. The best way to do that, they said, is for them to be able to freely form a union.
William Maloney of the Center for Labor Education and Research at the University of Kentucky told the panel:
Given the choice, management will never act in the interest of the worker. They’re always going to act in the interest of profits. I’m here to support what these workers have told you and argue that they’ve got to be given a greater say in how they’re being treated.
The Rev. Albert Pennybacker said people of faith should support the effort because “organized workers save management from playing God.”
4 Comments
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
Even Toyota? I had hoped that some companies actually cared about their workers as they evidently care about making reliable cars. The author of the article is right though. Whenever a corporation is given a choice b/w profit and workers - it will always choose profit. Unions should be mandatory. We should be fighting to legislate that any corporation with over 10 employees must have a union and not just to allow workers to choose.
If it weren’t for the United States market. Toyota would not have had any market at all. This is how they repay the American peoplewe realy need to show the CEO’s that they are not in charge of who puys their product. The greedy bas_____.
The practice of heavily weighting the labor force with temp-workers is a common tactic being used more and more by large multinational corporations to splinter and subjugate the workforce, driving down wages and working conditions. Honda, Toyota, Nissan,… are all doing this in this country and now the workers at Ford and Chrysler will be asked to take a $25/hr pay cut to bring their wages in line with the Japanese companies. This is a despicable practice that needs legislative controls such as a cap on the precentage of temp workers allowed and length of temporary status.
So sorry that toyota is as sorry as most other compaines in the world,It’s all about money. By the way, what labor union do the workers at toyota belong to?????????