Toyota USA: Running scared of the UAW

UPDATE, Nov. 13: Louisville Courier-Journal: Ford production workers in Louisville vote 'No' to tentative agreement between Ford, UAW

By BERRY CRAIG

AFT Local 1360

Kirk Gillenwaters wasn't surprised that right after the United Auto Workers strike won historic hikes in pay and benefits from the Big Three automakers, Toyota said it would fatten paychecks for hourly employees at its U.S. plants, none of which are unionized.

"It's trickle-down," said Gillenwaters, a Louisville UAW Local 862 retiree and president of the Kentucky Alliance for Retired Americans. "When unions in an industry successfully negotiate a contract for wage increases and better benefits, non-union workers in that same industry get a raise.”

While non-union Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky in Georgetown is the Japanese company’s largest plant in the world, Toyota's plants in Japan are unionized.  

“At Toyota, we take great pride in showing respect for people,” Reuters  quoted a statement from Chris Reynolds, Toyota North America executive vice president. “We value our employees and their contributions, and we show it by offering robust compensation packages that we continually review to ensure that we remain competitive within the automotive industry.”

Translation: We're scared the union is coming. "What Toyota did is just another example of the effect union wages have on nonunion workers," Gillenwaters said. 

When management at nonunion factories "bump up [hourly worker] salaries after they know what we've accomplished, it has made it more difficult to be able to organize those facilities" Gillenwaters said. But today he thinks the outlook is brighter for unions.

"I think younger worker in these [nonunion auto plants] see the union movement around the whole country becoming more inclusive," said Gillenwaters, pointing to successful unionizing drives in coffee shops -- including some in Louisville -- and in universities (the United Campus Workers is active in Kentucky). That right there, is opening the eyes of people working in the automotive industry that haven't had a union."

The UAW is coming for nonunion plants, UAW President Shawn Fain said in a recent livestreamed speech to union members.  

 “The UAW plans to target non-unionized automakers in the U.S., which could include Toyota, Tesla [owned by union-hating American Elon Musk], Nissan, Volkswagen, Honda, Hyundai and Kia, among others,” wrote Nathan Borney in Axios. Nissan and Honda are also Japanese-owned. Hyundai and Kia are South Korean, and Volkswagen is German-based. In addition to Toyota, those companies operate with union labor in their home countries.  

Said Fain: “when we return to the bargaining table in 2028, it won't just be with the Big Three, but with the Big Five or Big Six."

Many of the foreign-owned nonunion plants are in the “right to work” South, which has the lowest union density and highest poverty rates in the country. Often, governors and other conservative Republican politicians team up with employers and anti-union groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to keep unions out, said Gillenwaters. 

“The U.A.W. has previously tried to unionize Southern auto plants — where workers typically make significantly less than the top U.A.W. wage — with little success,” wrote Neal E. Boudette in The New York Times. “While it has unionized some small component plants in the South, and represents workers employed by heavy truck manufacturers like Mack and Freightliner, it has not been able to organize plants owned by any major automaker there.”

No matter, “…Fain has predicted that the union will organize multiple non-unionized automakers over the next several years — despite history showing that road fraught with potholes,” according to  Borney.

He added that “fresh from winning record contracts at General Motors, Ford and Stellantis, and with public support for unions recently at a six-decade high, this time might be different.”

Borney also wrote that “Tim Smith, director of UAW Region 8 — which includes Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, Texas, North Carolina and South Carolina — said the tide is changing in the South. ‘We've had a tremendous amount of calls coming in from Toyota" workers wanting to unionize, Smith tells Axios. ‘The main thing that's going to help us is these record, historical contracts. Why wouldn't you want to organize?’

Smith wasn't the only UAW regional director to laud the union's success at the bargaining table. David Green, UAW Region 2B director, told the Washington Post's Jeanne Whalen that "when Fain and his lieutenants presented the Ford deal to the union’s top leadership on Oct. 29, there were multiple rounds of applause."

“I’ve never seen contracts this rich in my years of paying union dues since 1989,” Whalen quoted Green.  

She also quoted Chris Pena, Chicago Local 551 president: "“We’ve received a lot of calls from people who want to organize now. We have a lot of nonunion shops that saw the power of the union and why it works.”

Wrote Whalen: "Fain’s brazen, theatrical and digitally savvy strike against Detroit’s Big Three automakers — Ford, General Motors and Stellantis — yielded one of the most worker-friendly contracts any union has negotiated in decades, with compensation gains that are already forcing other parts of the auto industry to raise wages. Fain combined potent symbolism — tossing auto offers in the trash and wearing an Eat the Rich T-shirt — with an unwavering call for workers to stand up and fight the 'corporate greed' and 'billionaire class' that he said was leaving them behind."