More Skeletons in the Closet for "Friendly" Toyota

[joemac]

Originally Posted by Uzzy

I used the name he used for me. And yes, unions had a purpose and it was very important. Thanks for a job well done, now what?

It would appear that most would like to give back what has been, fought for and of which thousands of American's died. Wanting to give it back is unthinkable. Our country is quickly becoming run and controlled entirely by corporations, it should be for "We the People", but that is a fading memory.

"We the people" need more rights, more say so, more input, not less.

I feel more comfortable if "we the People" run this place, much more so than a 1000 corporate executives controlling ever facet of our way of life.

It's the small things pop up of which most of America doesn't care to notice. Too much American Idol to watch. It was 2003 or 2004 I believe the bill was labeled flextime. It would redefine the standard work week from 40 hours to, 80 hours over two weeks. The key is 80 hours. If you work 50 hours one week, and 30 the next you get no overtime pay. Basically the employer works you for as long and when then need, and then has another out to not pay you overtime.

We want American's standard of living to get better, not worse right? And the top 1000 corporate executives are not in this consideration.

[AMERICA 123]

Originally Posted by Bvonscott

That's the truth of it. Toyota has become a master of bending public perception to its will. They are so successful at it that it's causing the demise of our American auto companies.

YEP.

Here is the other piece of 'why' and 'how'.

JUNE 27, 2005

MEDIA CENTRIC

An Onslaught Of Hidden Ads
Toyota Motor Corp. (TM ) has asked at least three major magazine companies to explore product integration -- that's product placement to you and me -- of its cars into magazine editorial pages. Say hello to another indicator of changing media mores.

There's no sign that Hearst Magazines, Meredith (MDP ), and Advance Publications, the parent of Condé Nast Publications, < and also owner of the New Yorker Magazine > are going along with what would be a major breach of the traditional wall between magazine editorial and advertising units.

Still, it's a time, says Deborah Wahl Meyer, vice-president for marketing at Lexus, in which "ideas can cross between advertising and editorial. It doesn't always need to have the 'advertorial' note on top."

Indeed, when Toyota came calling at each publisher, its execs talked up a favorite marketing coup: this year's multimillion-dollar deal that put its vehicles on reality-TV show The Contender. (BusinessWeek (MHP ) sales execs say they are discussing advertorials with the car giant.)

Toyota's notions aren't universally welcomed. "We'll sell our mothers, but this doesn't work," says a mystified magazine executive who attended one presentation and, fearing a major advertiser's wrath, insisted on anonymity. "I can't sell you an article. I don't even know how to price it." -

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine...6/b3939043.htm

[AMERICA 123]

Originally Posted by Uzzy

I used the name he used for me. And yes, unions had a purpose and it was very important. Thanks for a job well done, now what?

Easy - prevent the kind of stuff that Toyota's doing as outlined in the 65 page paper contained in the original post.

[hunterjus]

Just sent a link to CTV I think its gonna fall on deaf ears

[AMERICA 123]

Originally Posted by joemac

Well when your literally imprisoned in what seems can be a life of death scenario, one would do a fantastic job of bolting the thing together.

Yes certainly ' highly' motivated, but sometimes...... - depends if they're given proper tools, lighting, food, water, shelter and 'rest'.

Usually they aren't.

Here's one that ties everything together on this thread.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/htm...slavery21.html

Sunday, January 21, 2007 - Page updated at 12:00 AM
Permission to reprint or copy this article or photo, other than personal use, must be obtained from The Seattle Times. Call 206-464-3113 or e-mail resale@seattletimes.com with your request.
CLAUDIO PEREZ / BLOOMBERG NEWS
A policeman, armed with a submachine gun, stands watch over a group of workers at the camp.

CLAUDIO PEREZ / BLOOMBERG NEWS
Thick, gray smoke engulfs a man in a charcoal camp in Tucurui, Brazil. Government inspectors and police discovered 29 slaves at this camp last fall that supplied charcoal used to make pig iron exported to the United States to make steel.

BLOOMBERG NEWS
A man rests against a tin-roofed shack where slaves sleep in unventilated rooms without running water or bathrooms at the Transcameta camp near the city of Tucurui in the Brazilian Amazon.

Enslaved workers make charcoal used to make basic steel ingredient

By Michael Smith (and David Voreacos
Bloomberg News

Labor inspector Benedito Silva Filho and six armed police officers move cautiously through the gray smoke that hugs the ground in the Carvoaria Transcameta work camp near Tucurui in the Brazilian Amazon. Enveloped in the haze is a solitary man, dressed in soiled red shorts and worn-out plastic sandals.
Alexandre Pereira dos Reis stops shoveling charcoal from a kiln after working eight hours and, wheezing, walks slowly toward the inspectors. The laborer says malaria, a chronic cough and the 95-degree heat have gotten the best of him.
"This hits you hard," says dos Reis, 32. "I would leave if I could, but I need the work."

Many laborers go months without pay or see their wages whittled to nothing because of expenses such as tools, boots and gloves. Lack of money, an impenetrable jungle and a long distance to get home make it impossible for the slaves to leave.

Dos Reis toils six days a week and can't afford to leave; he doesn't have enough money to get back to his home in Teresina, 500 miles away in northeastern Brazil.

He lives next to the brick kilns at Transcameta in a shack with no ventilation, running water or electricity.
The charcoal he and the other laborers produce by burning scraps of hardwood will be trucked south to a blast furnace six hours away. It will be used to make pig iron, a basic ingredient of steel.

"This is slavery," Silva says. His eyes tear from the acrid smoke.
Silva has descended unannounced in September on this charcoal-making camp — one of about 1,000 in the Amazon — to investigate reports that it uses unpaid labor.
The policemen who flank him wield automatic weapons, ready to fend off the deadly violence that Silva says is part of his job.

They determine all 29 workers are slaves who haven't been paid in months.

More than a century after Brazil became the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery, in 1888, nearly 1 million men and women work for little or no wages as forced laborers in Latin America, according to the Geneva-based International Labor Organization, a United Nations agency that tries to improve working conditions.
Recruiters dispatched by slave-camp owners promise steady paying jobs, says Marcelo Campos, who runs the Brazilian labor ministry's Special Mobile Enforcement Group.

Once at the Amazon camps, some workers are forced — at times at gunpoint — to work off debts to their bosses for food and clothing bought at company stores.

- and he gets exhausted early in the day and has to stop work. Twenty feet away, a man walks by a patch of ground covered with human excrement that serves as a camp bathroom.

Brazilian pig iron is part of almost any product in the U.S. that uses steel, says Hogan, who's been trading scrap metal and pig iron for 30 years.
"It could be in your car, your refrigerator," he says. "It could be in beams for the roadway, any kind of construction, any kind of oil industry stuff. Everything."

Toyota didn't join Ford, DaimlerChrysler, General Motors and Honda on Dec. 4 <2006> when they announced plans to work together to train suppliers to avoid buying materials made by slaves.

But a Toyota spokesman said it did change its decision Dec. 21 and joined the anti-slavery effort.

- after the following was discovered and leaked.....

U.S. Customs records show Toyota's trading company, Toyota Tsusho's U.S. unit, bought at least seven shipments of pig iron from Usina Siderurgica de Maraba, or Usimar, in 2006.

Usimar purchased charcoal from a camp where Brazilian inspectors in May found 22 people, including three children, who weren't being paid for their work.

They were living in squalid shacks without electricity and plumbing, and drinking unsanitary water, the inspectors reported.

Usimar, a privately held company, has dropped out of a Brazilian association of pig-iron producers that's sponsoring programs to combat slavery in charcoal camps, says Marta de Lima Cavalcanti, a spokeswoman for the industry group.

Copyright © The Seattle Times Company

Naaaaahhhhh, these guys don't need a union.

[Hoboken Tim]

The UAW should be using this information in it's effort to unionize the Toyota factories
in the USA

[Uzzy]

Originally Posted by Hoboken Tim

The UAW should be using this information in it's effort to unionize the Toyota factories
in the USA

Why? Is it hapening in the USA? They should go global like the auto industry is doing, but they won't and that is why they will die. It is now the government's job to police it, not a rag tag bunch of highschool drop-outs. And don't give me the "what about the sweat shops in the US already?" crap. They are few and far between and you can't make cars and parts in a couple of floors in an old delapidated building in the inner city.

[AMERICA 123]

Well, lets see what the rest of the 'Asia is going to give AMERICA Prosperity Sphere' is doing.

This article appears in the May 12, 2006 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
LaRouche Warns Nissan's Wage Killer:
'Mississippi Is Not Manchukuo'

by Bonnie James
The Japanese car-maker Nissan is leading a "race to the bottom," in a drive to bust wages, working conditions, benefits, and the right to organize, in what a Mississippi State Legislator has called a "racial experiment on African American workers, aimed at how low they can drive auto, and American workers as a whole."

In its Canton, Miss. plant, Nissan has slashed wages to about 40% below what an union autoworker in one of the Big Three auto plants earns, and about 20% under the pay scale for Nissan workers in the company's Smyrna, Tenn. plant, some 300 miles distant.

The average hourly wage in Canton is about $12 an hour, while the supplier industries for the plant are paying $9-11 per hour. These are poverty-level wages, for full-time, skilled industrial work.

In a discussion with EIR's Paul Gallagher on April 28, State Rep. James Evans, who represents Mississippi's 70th legislative district, and is a member of the state AFL-CIO organizing committee, pointed out that the Canton plant is "part of the Black Belt ... the City of Jackson is 75-80% black; and the county is the same kind of numbers, and maybe even more." The "experiment" being carried out at Canton, just north of the state capital at Jackson, is based on taking an "eager," largely black workforce, and using the plant as a model to destroy wage standards throughout the auto industry, and across the board.

The driving force behind Nissan's Nazi-like labor policy is Carlos Ghosn, a Brazilian-born Lebanese, trained in France, who became CEO of the company in 2000, and instituted the so-called Nissan Revival Plan. Ghosn—also the chief operating officer of Renault, Nissan's industrial partner—is known throughout the industry as "Le Cost Killer."

Under his anti-labor, "shareholder value" regime, Nissan's stock price tripled from 2000 to 2003. The Canton plant, begun in 2000, was part of the "revival." Nissan built it on the quick, and it opened in 2003 with production of the Nissan Quest minivan. Now it also makes the Nissan Titan pickup, Armada SUV, Altima sedan, and the upscale Infiniti sport-utility vehicle.

The corner-cutting has led to manufacturing defects in the cars. All but the Altima have received unacceptable ratings this year from Consumer Reports magazine, and sales fell 0.6% at the same time that the market increased 1.1%.

Evans charges that Nissan is treating its workers "like human cattle": "When you decide on this race to the bottom—it's two ways that you can level off standards of living. You can bring the folks at the bottom up to the folks at the top, or you can drop the folks at the top down toward the folks at the bottom.

"And treating them like human cattle—the fact that he [Ghosn] has laid off over 100,000 folks, and driven wages down, lets you know that he's trying to set a standard for how fast they can accelerate this race to the bottom in wages.

And this is the experiment to see—because this is the worst shop; it's strategically located; and I'm certain that the results, of how well he survives this in the long haul, is what the industry and others are waiting to see."

"It's part of the race to the bottom as far as the middle class is concerned," Evans emphasized, "and it's greed driving down the middle class.

This is one step above servitude, for $12 an hour. That's what that is, with no respect on the job, no rights on the job.

Now, what are the details again, concerning Toyota's new plant in...... Misissippi ????

Naaaahhhhh, - these guys don't need a union.

[Nasty_SS]

Originally Posted by Saturn69

I guess it would be better to buy a Mexico-built Chevy than ANY kind of Toyota since buying the Toyota would reward this abhorrent behavior.

THATS RIGHT DING DONG.......IT STILL SUPPORTS GM RETIREES......TOYOTA AND THEIR WAY OF DOING THINGS DOESNT OFFER A COMPANY PENSION.....ANOTHER WAY TOYOTA IS WRECKING AMERICAAND BRINGING IT DOWN....

[Nasty_SS]

Originally Posted by AMERICA 123

Well, lets see what the rest of the 'Asia is going to give AMERICA PROSPERITY' sphere is doing.



Now, what are the details again, concerning Toyota's new plant in...... Misissippi ????

Naaaahhhhh, - these guys don't need a union.

Hopefully, those people realize they need a union if they want a livable wage .......

[AMERICA 123]

I sure hope everyone reads the report - the PR release is rather mild.

Its surprising what they've been up to - even for me.


Table of Contents

1. Preface
2. Will Celebrities Also Care About Workers Rights
3. Executive Summary
4. Overworked To Death At The Prius Plant
5. Karoshi
6. All Roads Lead To Toyota
7. Touring a Toyota Plant
8. Hours
9. Wages at the Toyota Plant
10. Lowering Wage and Benefits in the U.S.
11. Toyota's Supply Chain Riddled with Sweatshop Abuse
12. Linked to Human Trafficking
13. Subcontract Workers also Cheated
14. White Collar Workers Exploited
15. Linked to Burmese Dictators
16. Repression of Labor Rights in Philippines
17. No Raise in 10 Years
18. Japan's Middle Class Under Attack
19. Company Controlled Union
20. Japan Country Profile
21. How the Research Was Conducted
22. Some of the Real Unions and Solidarity Organizations in Japan
23. Toyota Corporate Contacts

[Robert Ryan]

A little off topic, but several years ago while in Spain I was shocked that McDonalds was serving food in the same styrafoam containers that they were forced to get rid of in the United States.

They still do in Australia, but they also have MCafe ,something that is very foreign to Mcdonalds in the US. Introduced here by the same Australian who became the CEO of Mcdonalds in the US.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCaf%C3%A9

[chickenkicker]

Originally Posted by Smoke

I e-mailed this to my local stations and you guys should do the same. I am tired of Toyota never getting bashed while it is a daily occurence for the Detroit 3.

I sent it in to CNN, here's hoping they look into it.

[tholland]

PR Newswire picked the story up as well as Edmonds...

http://www.edmunds.com/insideline/do...ticleId=127529

Toyota addressed the allegations late Wednesday with a brief statement. "We are reviewing the lengthy report issued today by the National Labor Committee," the automaker said. "As the well-being of our workforce and suppliers is one of our highest priorities, we are taking the allegations seriously." Toyota spokesman Curt McAllister told Inside Line on Thursday that the automaker has no further comment on the controversial report.....

.....
What this means to you: Some unusual bad press for the popular Prius in a report that seems to have taken Toyota by surprise.

*Edit: Here's another link from Daily Green...
http://www.thedailygreen.com/living-...-abuses-460608

[MaxLegroom]

I took the time to read the whole report. At first I was about to write it off as union propaganda. Then I was thinking, didn't I want to see companies around the world have to deal with American style unions? Let's see what it's like when Chinese factory workers insist on a middle class way of life. Workers of the world unite, indeed. Once I got into the meat of the article, I was quite intrigued, but hardly surprised. This is how most of the world seems to work, and it is disgusting. Still, I'd have liked to see more details, a better bibliography, further sources to be read. I want to know more, to put it simply.

I also wonder, at this point, how much longer I'll keep the Prius. I hardly bought it to make a political statement, but to find that parts of my car were built by people who were de facto slaves in Japan is something that I find deeply disturbing. On the other hand, I know that a fair part of the new and decidedly expensive homes where I live were built by illegal aliens. I recall making a check of a area under construction in a planned urban development (you know the sort, country club, golf course, expensive homes) to find several workers there. I was doing security work at the time. There were several workers still there. I found out that none of them spoke English, none had a driver's license, and they left in a old Camaro before I could get the police on line, never mind my own backup. That was about 15 years ago.

But back to the issue at hand. You can't believe Toyota executives don't know what's going on (they say they are investigating). But I would add another caution. Any car that uses Japanese components may also be made, in part, by this sort of labor. Think about it carefully, and read some more of the NLC's reports. By the time you're done, you won't want to buy much of anything, if you care at all about worker's rights, or human rights.