'Major announcement' from Toyota this afternoon

[BroadyFord]

Article I just came across, which accurately outlines how the unions destroyed Toyota.

Australian workplace culture partly to blame for Toyota's exit

http://www.theage.com.au/business/co...211-32djv.html

The Australian car-making industry might be on its knees, but Toyota's manufacturing enterprise agreement was still scheduled to deliver two pay rises totalling 5.5 per cent this year.

To cover the $17 million cost of the pay increases, Toyota put a proposal to its manufacturing workers late last year to cut back the three-week compulsory Christmas shutdown, cut down on long weekend sickies and blood-bank rorts, excessive overtime, and shift loadings.

Ford had signalled it would pull out of local production in 2016, and General Motors-Holden was girding its loins for a similar announcement. Local production of Toyota's next generation Camry – and its larger Aurion spinoff – was up for grabs after the current model ran out in 2017. Toyota Motor Corp was due to make the crucial decision this year.

In the circumstances, you'd think the Toyota workers and the Australian Manufacturing Workers' Union would play ball. But instead, the union orchestrated a Federal Court challenge by a handful of shop stewards to prevent Toyota putting the changes to its workers for a vote, citing a "no extra claims" clause in the enterprise agreement.

Justice Mordy Bromberg agreed. He said the company would first have to call a vote to waive the "no extra claims" clause. If they voted in favour of that, it could then put the other changes to a vote. The two-step process would take until well into the new year.

To say that Toyota was dismayed would be an understatement.
By this time – December – two-thirds of the industry had announced it was pulling out, citing the excessive costs of producing cars in Australia. Both Toyota and Holden had argued that it cost about $3800 more to build a car here than it did in alternative plants. About half of that cost was labour, Holden indicated to the Productivity Commission.

Barriers to success

Here was Toyota trying to close a small slice of that gap, with the clock ticking on the fate of local production, and a Federal Court judge was telling the company that it couldn’t put the deal to a vote without first asking the workers to vote out the “no extra claims” clause.

Australia’s arcane and combative industrial relations culture was not the only reason for Toyota’s decision. As the Productivity Commission made clear in its position paper, the country’s tiny market couldn’t sustain competitive production of commodity autos, and was being monstered by the explosion of Asian auto production in the past decade.

But the culture of the workplace was clearly a material reason for the company’s decision to pull out in 2017.

Max Yasuda, Toyota Australia president, had signalled that the giant auto maker was losing patience with Aussie workplace culture in an exclusive interview with this newspaper two years ago. “If you don’t work on Friday, it is a long weekend right? In this country, and in our plant, they just don’t come in and later on they ask for sick leave,” he said.

Months later, Toyota tapped 350 workers for redundancy based on individual ratings of their attendance and workperformance records – an unusually aggressive approach in unionised workplaces in Australia.

The previous year it had been embroiled in a bruising industrial battle with the AMWU over the enterprise agreement. Australian car making was already in trouble, with a soaring dollar and massive global overcapacity in the wake of the global financial crisis. Yet Toyota’s workers went on strike for five days and banned overtime to secure the deal which tripped Toyota up in court and which will give them two pay rises this year – even as the company prepares to pull out.

AMWU vehicle division chief Dave Smith made it clear the union was punishing Toyota for being less willing to sit down and negotiate with its reps as “equals”, as it said Holden had done. The union may now be regretting that decision, although Holden’s experience suggests it may not have made any difference in the long run.