Downtrodden UAW Makes New Push
By Sholnn Freeman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, May 26, 2007
GEORGETOWN, Ky. -- Dissident workers at the Toyota plant here gather at the Best Western Georgetown on Wednesdays between shifts to shape a battle plan. The workers are angry at conditions at this flagship Toyota site, where the best-selling Camry is built.
The United Auto Workers has launched a big new push to organize the plant, trying to capitalize on fears of lower pay, outsourcing of jobs and on Toyota's treatment of injured workers. The stakes for the UAW intensified this month as a private-equity firm agreed to buy Chrysler, raising fears that the union will be unable to block cuts in jobs and benefits at a privately owned automaker.
The Chrysler deal has underscored the UAW's diminished clout as membership has shrunk along with jobs at the Detroit automakers. The UAW has never succeeded in organizing a foreign auto assembly plant in the United States, but Toyota's emergence as the world's largest automaker has added urgency to this effort. The UAW will begin new contract negotiations this summer without any workers from Toyota.
"We've got a lot of work to do," said Charles Lite, 41, a member of the organizing group, speaking of the effort at Toyota. "No more mistakes."
The UAW and the workers have seized on leaked business documents from Toyota that detail a plan to put a lid on manufacturing wages in the United States. At a new factory being built in Mississippi, Toyota plans to pay workers about $20 an hour in a region where many people earn $12 to $13 an hour. The average Toyota worker at Georgetown makes about $25 an hour.
Toyota officials say the increasing pressures of the auto business have caused the company to reevaluate worker's compensation policies -- a matter that has to be negotiated with the union at UAW-represented plants. Toyota today is one of the auto industry's most profitable companies, and officials think its continued success depends on controlling costs.
"We think the historic American approach to things is to run full blast, pay out as high as you can in the short term while times are good, and then when times go bust, you lay people off, you shut plants and you destroy communities," said Pete Gritton, a Toyota vice president who oversees human resources at the company's plant. "Toyota does not want to do that."
Gritton said adjusting pay scales would ultimately translate into stable employment for American autoworkers. He said Toyota is seeking to maintain cost-effective growth in the United States so it can compete with low-wage countries such as China, Mexico and Brazil.
"We are the only major manufacturer of automobiles that is trying to grow and expand its business in the U.S. right now," Gritton said. "Everybody else is trying to collapse and shrink and send it to somewhere else for lower costs."
Some Toyota workers agree. "I think the people I work with are not really for a union," said Tina Goad, who has worked at Georgetown for 13 years. She acknowledged that there have been some injuries and other problems, but added: "This is a manufacturing place. Things happen. If I was a secretary in a some bank for 30 years, I could get carpal tunnel from working on computers. They always want to blame Toyota."
But others are upset, saying autoworkers are losing ground. Ed McKenna, 52, is part of the group fighting for a Toyota union. He said he recently came across a worker getting paid $8.50 an hour for a production job that is now outsourced. "It was the same job I had five years ago making $23 an hour," he said. "We can't tolerate that."
Other workers complained about poor treatment after getting injured on the job. Jennifer York, 40, injured discs in her back and got carpal tunnel syndrome in one of her wrists from building engines. She was then put to work printing papers that tell other workers what parts go on which cars.
York was put on lighter duty because of her injuries as a way to keep her on the payroll with full benefits, Toyota officials said. But for York, the job is as hard as any other in the plant. She also makes 20 percent less money and works an overnight shift that finishes at 2 a.m. She isn't satisfied with her new work arrangement and she's getting fed up with Toyota.
"I have a crappy job. I'm on second shift. I'm in pain," she said.
York says she is considering signing a union card for the first time in 19 years at Toyota. "It might just bring a new set of problems, but something has to be done," she said. "We need help."
When it built the Georgetown plant 20 years ago, Toyota was "a middle-of-the-pack auto manufacturer, somewhere below Chrysler," McKenna said.
Today Toyota is the highflying auto giant that recently surpassed General Motors as the world's largest automaker. "There are a lot of good, hardworking Kentucky people responsible for that success," McKenna said.
Toyota selected the Georgetown site during a wave of Japanese factory-building in the 1980s that was meant to counter criticism from Detroit and in Washington of rising imports. Georgetown is Toyota's highest-volume factory outside Japan. It serves as a template for the other plants the company is building around the country, including a new $1.3 billion factory in Tupelo, Miss., that is scheduled to open in three years.
About 7,200 people work at the Georgetown plant where the Camry, Solara and Avalon cars are made almost from scratch. Georgetown builds all its own engines. A plastics shop makes bumpers and instrument panels. The air is clogged with layers of industrial noise and music -- from stamping presses pounding out doors and hoods from rolls of steel, robots welding the different parts together and radios blaring country, jazz and soul music.
Since the second half of the 20th century, auto jobs have been among the highest-paid in all of manufacturing. Steel wages and construction wages followed them. In rural towns, high wages put pressure on other local employers to pay more.
"Instead of leading with $25 or $27, you have them paying $12," said Ross E. Eisenbrey, vice president and policy director of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. "That whole effect is wiped out. For the larger economy, it's downward pressure on wages. There won't be a lift that auto wages were providing in the past."
The dissidents at Toyota hold their Wednesday meetings in the Best Western's Avalon room -- named after the car built at the plant. Some wear shirts emblazoned with a UAW-Toyota logo.
They say Toyota's hard-line positions prompted workers to seek help from the UAW. "We don't know how to organize," said Kenny Harper, who has worked at Toyota for 18 years. "We need professional assistance."
On April 28, the workers' group and union organizers celebrated Worker Memorial Day with a service at a Georgetown park. They placed 2,000 small white paper bags with candles along a walkway surrounding a large pond. The bags represented the number of workers the union group says have been pushed out of Toyota jobs because of injuries over the past five years. They sang "Amazing Grace," read from the Bible and symbolically acknowledged some of the major injuries that affect manufacturing workers: tendinitis, carpal tunnel syndrome, connective tissue disorder, wrist pain, lower back pain, sprains and strains.
Aileen Waugh, 51, said she had been on work restrictions for seven weeks because of torn cartilage in her wrist. She hopes the hand will heal, making surgery unnecessary.
"I think we are past due for everybody to see the other side," Waugh said. "It's not just about building great cars."
View all comments that have been posted about this article.