Shawn Fain: Toyota management will 'hit you with fear' and 'tell you everything they can tell you to keep you non-union.'

By BERRY CRAIG

Alliance for Retired Americans

Is Toyota scared of the UAW?

“One of our biggest goals coming out of this historic contract victory is to organize like we’ve never organized before,” UAW President Shawn Fain said. Toyota is among the targeted non-union automakers.

No sooner did the union win a record contract from Detroit's Big Three automakers--Ford, General Motors and Stellantis--than Toyota (and other non-union auto manufacturers) announced pay hikes for workers.

Toyota Kentucky president: We know what's best, not UAW "outsiders"

Toyota's biggest vehicle plant in the world is in Georgetown, Ky. Heretofore, UAW organizing attempts have come up short.

The pay hike suggests Toyota might be worried this time. There's more evidence: Toyota Kentucky President Kerry Creech's recent op-ed in the Louisville Courier-Journal.

He didn't mention the UAW. (A C-J editor added a link that did: "Could Toyota be next to unionize? UAW and UPS labor contract wins set the tone."

Creech claimed "outsiders are coming into our community to talk about what they think is best for Toyota team members."  

Vowed Creech: "Let me be clear: Our team members have the power to speak and advocate for themselves, and they do so every single day. This has served them well over the past three and a half decades, and that will continue in the decades to come."

"Outsiders? We've heard that same old rhetoric for years," said Kirk Gillenwaters, a longtime Kentucky union activist and Louisville UAW Local 862 retiree. Organizing facilities is done by the workers on the inside of facilities. The aspect of what organizers do is educate the workers inside those facilities on the issues and benefits that can be had from joining a union and union members from across the state--not just UAW members--support organizing at Toyota for the betterment of Toyota workers."

"These are not out-of-town people," Kentucky State AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer Jeff Wiggins said of the UAW. "They're our friends and neighbors. Their goal is to fight for working people and help get them a fair contract and a fair wage while these big companies are making record profits."

Added Wiggins: "Where was the outcry from these companies when real outsiders came into Kentucky to help push for 'right to work?'"  

Gillenwaters, president of the Kentucky  branch of the Alliance for Retired Americans, agrees that the "outsider" label doesn't fit the UAW. "We are the voice of workers at two Ford plants in Louisville and a General Motors Corvette plant in Bowling Green."  

There are several other UAW locals across the state, too.

The "UAW bump"

Besides Toyota, the UAW plans organizing campaigns for Tesla, a pair of startup electric vehicle companies--Lucid and Rivian-- and nine other foreign owned vehicle  companies, Honda, Hyundai, Nissan, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Subaru, Volkswagen, Mazda and Volvo,  according to  The New York Times.

Anyway, all of those companies except Lucid and Rivian boosted worker pay following the UAW's contract success, Reuters reported. Fain called the fatter paychecks the "UAW bump." 

“When we return to the bargaining table in 2028, it won’t just be with a Big Three, but with a Big Five or Big Six,” Fain said.  

The UAW president was a featured speaker at the Kentucky State AFL-CIO convention in Lexington earlier this month. Before he addressed the delegates, Fain traveled a dozen or so miles to Georgetown to speak to some plant workers. During his convention speech, Fain warned that Toyota management will "hit you with fear," the Lexington Herald-Leader's Linda Blackford reported. "They’re going to tell you everything they can tell you to keep you non-union.”

He also said, “The Big Three made $250 billion in the last decade. Toyota alone made $265.3 billion in the last decade, 90 billion in the last three years. Toyota CEO pay in the last two years went up 125%. So as I told those workers, when they hit you with this b----s---, hit them back. Ask them why CEO pay went up 125% in two years. Ask them why they can’t share $90 billion in profits in the last three years?”

Fain further said, "They’re doing it on the backs of the workers, and as I told the workers, as long as you accept it, as long as you remain an employee at will, you’re gonna get more of the same. As I told them, when they’re being hit with fear. We have to do whatever the hell we have to do to win by any means necessary.” 

Fain challenged, "the only limits we have are the limits we put on ourselves.” He predicted Georgetown Toyota would go union.

Creech followed up on his "outsider charge" by insisting that "Toyota team members know this company, and they know this community. They live here. They’re the heart of Toyota." As part of their strategy to keep unions at bay, owners and managers at many non-union companies frequently use terms like "team members" to describe hourly workers. Walmart calls them "associates." 

Calling workers "team members" and "associates" fosters a false sense of equality at work and distracts workers from the enormous pay gap between what they and company managers and owners make, said Gillenwaters. "In 2022, CEOs were paid 344 times as much as a typical worker in contrast to 1965 when they were paid 21 times as much as a typical worker," according to the Economic Policy Institute.

'The Toyota Way' is the keep unions at bay way.

In writing about the UAW's unsuccessful organizing drive at German-owned Volkswagen's Chattanooga, Tenn., plant in 20I4, labor journalist Mike Elk cited "a management culture known as the Toyota Way," which he said was "developed at the non-union Toyota factories that dot the South and eventually adopted by supervisors at Volkswagen and other plants."

Elk runs Payday Report, an online labor newspaper that reports on unions globally. In an article first published by In These Times, he explained that "The Toyota Way refers to 14 principles that are drilled into the heads of workers and supervisors. In 2004, engineering professor Jeffrey K. Liker, who’d studied the Toyota plants extensively, popularized the style with his hot-selling book The Toyota Way, which quickly became the bible for managers who wanted to learn the secrets of Toyota’s success. (In the most recent quarter, Toyota made as much in profits as its two closest competitors—Volkswagen and General Motors—combined.)

Elk quoted Nelson Lichtenstein, director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy at the University of California-Santa Barbara: “Toyota Way’ can mean a bundle of things. The original [meaning] is lean production and so-called team production—multiskilling—which is a way of having just enough workers to strew the line and keep everyone working full out.”

Elk wrote that "in other words, supervisors trained in the Toyota Way promote a sense of team loyalty and an unquestioning allegiance to the company, which deters workers from speaking up against management." 

He also quoted Masaki Saruta, a business professor at Japan's Chukyo University who authored several books about Toyota. "The real ‘Toyota Way’ is a culture of control,” he said in a 2019 Los Angeles Times article.

While Creech claimed  that Toyota "team members have the power to speak and advocate for themselves, and they do so every single day," Saruta wrote that "the fear of bucking supervisors is so strong that many inside of Toyota were afraid of speaking up about accelerator flaws that led to one of the biggest recalls of vehicles in American history."