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Workers don't see value of unionizing
By Doron Levin Bloomberg News Service
Published on Tuesday, Sep 11, 2007
Another Labor Day is history, and another futile year has passed for union organizers trying to recruit Toyota workers in Georgetown, Ky.
With union jobs vanishing and financially ailing Detroit automakers pressing the United Auto Workers union for cuts in pay and benefits in order to survive, it would be a stunning and unexpected upset (and one Detroit automakers would applaud) if the UAW could somehow penetrate Toyota.
The UAW keeps declining as the Detroit Three and many of their parts suppliers shrink. The U.S. auto industry actually is doing well; it's the union-represented segment that's dying. That plunge in unionized automotive employment echoes a nationwide drop in union membership.
Toyota workers can spot trends, and that's why recruitment in Georgetown looks hopeless for the UAW, which has been trying to figure out how to entice Toyota workers since the plant opened in 1988. For all the union's sloganeering about ''innovative partnerships with employers and negotiated industry-leading wage and benefits for members,'' its value proposition more closely approximates ''give us what we want or we go on strike.'' Most of Toyota's 7,000 Georgetown workers know a shakedown when they see one.
Sparse attendance
Meetings near the plant held on behalf of the union by a coalition of activists have been attracting only about 100 people, according to Toyota.
But the UAW's bag of tricks isn't empty. This year's bargaining with Detroit automakers for a new labor contract might provide union recruiters with some fresh talking points. The current contract expires Friday. General Motors, Ford and Chrysler are pressing for concessions and lower labor costs; their goal is to narrow the substantial gap with Toyota's costs.
Naturally, lower labor costs in Detroit will pressure Toyota to become even more competitive. In February the Detroit Free Press published an internal Toyota document pilfered from a computer at the Georgetown plant; it contained a warning from a Toyota executive that rising labor costs in Toyota's North American operations must be brought under control.
UAW supporters have been spotlighting that document as evidence that Toyota workers urgently need union representation to prevent the company from reducing wages and benefits. In January, Toyota will begin charging workers $50 a month for families covered under its health insurance, more evidence in the view of UAW supporters that unrepresented autoworkers in Kentucky are liable to lose pay and benefits.
Back in Detroit, UAW bargainers are turning up the heat on the Detroit Three to help the union organize Denso Corp. Denso is a Japanese affiliate of Toyota that operates parts plants in Battle Creek, Mich., and elsewhere in the U.S., employing more than 6,800 workers, all nonunion.
Citing people with knowledge of the strategy, Bloomberg News reported the UAW has asked GM, Ford and Chrysler to apply pressure to Denso, which supplies Detroit automakers as well as Toyota with parts, to declare itself neutral during the UAW's recruitment drive. In return the UAW will look favorably on the formation of union-run health-care trusts that may reduce the automakers' costs.
Presumably, if Denso failed to play along, its Detroit automaker clients might look elsewhere for parts. So far Denso says no automaker has requested a neutrality pledge.
A similar strategy in 2002 helped the union organize nine Johnson Controls Inc. plants in the U.S. after a two-day UAW strike forced GM and Chrysler to halt vehicle production.
Getting desperate
The UAW's latest initiatives for organizing Toyota may fairly be described as desperate. In the last few years, UAW leaders have begun to realize that Detroit's financial woes are real and potentially deadly to the union, and they're caused by an obsolete business model designed by the automakers in part to satisfy union demands that wages and benefits always climb.
Toyota, one of the wealthiest companies in the world, has been speaking candidly to its workers about the need to collect premiums for health-care coverage once provided at no charge to employees.
''We don't want to get into the same kinds of problems that others have in health care,'' Toyota spokesman Mike Goss said. ''It's our way of making sure that everything we've promised will be here for the long term.''
No one can know how long the long term will be. But because Toyota treats workers like grown-ups and isn't afraid to broach the subject of rising costs with them directly, it's hard to see why Toyota workers would choose the UAW as an intermediary.
Another Labor Day is history, and another futile year has passed for union organizers trying to recruit Toyota workers in Georgetown, Ky.
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