Toyota Motor's dark side

Toyota Motor Corporation has become the first Japanese company to report record earnings of one trillion yen. While most newspapers and magazines gave big space to report Toyota's astronomic profits, the Akahata Sunday edition on May 23 featured the company's dark side as follows:

On May 12, when Toyota's one trillion yen in profits was big news, a 33-year-old Toyota worker was crushed to death in a pressing machine at an assembly plant making luxury cars for exports to North American markets.

A colleague said, "I still have his father's grievous cry stuck to my brain. I blame Toyota's just-in-time inventory system for his death, because we are always forced into a race against time in order to avoid causing problems in later processes or stopping the lines."

Toyota's subcontractors are no exception. Even on Saturdays and Sundays, they keep working with the 30% cost-cutting demand from Toyota. " I can manage for now to deal with such a wild demand, but I don't know what will happen in the future. Subcontractors' lives hinge on Toyota," an owner of a subcontracting company said.

Toyota Motor Corp. forces its workers and subcontractors to bear awful pains, including reduction in wages and costs.

Toyota seeks to achieve a 15-percent market share in the world by 2010. If Toyota meets this objective, its car sales will be more than 9 million units a year, surpassing the present top selling automaker General Motors Corporation.

Shiramizu Hironori, vice president of Toyoya Motor Corp., says the company will introduce the ultimate in Lean Production. Citing an example that a three-month job was done in three weeks, Shiramizu gave a pep talk to middle-level managers, "Challenge the impossible! Challenge the incommensurable!"

With the aim of increasing Toyota's market share in China, Shiramizu urged the middle managers to be determined to establish an assembly line and a production system that will enable Toyota to defeat Chinese competitors.

Ishida Kuniyoshi, a 54-year-old worker at Takaoka factory in Toyota City, said, "Toyota no longer has its rivals to compete with. It is inflicting a heavier sacrifice on us by telling us, 'Up with Toyota!'. As a result, three workers at my factory have killed themselves this year."

World's 4 poles

Since 1990, Toyota has quadrupled its overseas production while decreasing domestic production by 15 percent. Toyota's PR department said that it has succeeded in earning profits in four poles (Japan, North America, Europe, and Asia). Earnings in North America account for 60 percent of the total.

Toyota in the mid-1980s started shifting production to North America, Europe, and Asia. It currently has 46 subsidiaries in 26 countries and regions.

Criticism has arisen from German labor unions and scholars as Toyota moved production abroad with its "just-in-time" system. They criticized the system as the root cause of workers' long and excessive work and Toyota labor unions for accepting such working conditions under labor-management agreements.

Chukyo University Professor Saruta Masaki who has been researching Toyota said, "In the countries where Toyota has established its production base, labor unions study its production system and reject what will put workers at a disadvantage. Toyota must abide by the laws and respect cultures in other countries."

Last February, about 1,300 workers converged on the Toyota head office to demand that the company fulfill its social responsibility.

Toyota started to keep workers' work time records in April last year as a result of the joint efforts of workers and the Japanese Communist Party to abolish overtime work without pay that sometimes causes workers' death. (end)