Toyota Workers: Company Runs over Our Rights

[Omaha Steve]

http://blog.aflcio.org/2007/06/11/toyota-workers-company-runs-over-our-rights/

Toyota Workers: Company Runs over Our Rights

by James Parks, Jun 11, 2007

Toyota touts its success and sells its cars with the slogan “Moving Forward.” But current and former workers at Toyota’s plant in Georgetown, Ky., say the company is “moving forward” with plans to cut pay and replace injured workers with temporary employees, who receive half the pay of full-time workers and few benefits.

“They’re trying to get a job there,” Cornelia James, a 19-year Georgetown worker, told a workers’ rights board hearing in Georgetown yesterday.

Full-time employment is dangled in front of them like a carrot, and they’re told, any missteps and you’re out.

In a comment posted today on the AFL-CIO Now blog, “warrior,” an 18-year Toyota employee, shares similar experiences:

I am an 18-year “team” member at Toyota in Georgetown. A person who does not work here really has no idea what goes on….I’ve had many friends that have been hurt and have had surgeries only to come back on a different shift and a different area doing a job that was worse than the one they had been hurt on. Toyota will fight tooth and nail to make sure that any injury is not an OSHA recordable. For Toyota, image is everything.

More than 200 people, many of them workers at the Toyota plant, gathered in a building just yards away from Toyota Stadium on the Georgetown College campus for the hearing, sponsored by Kentucky Jobs with Justice. The hearing follows a March 31 town hall forum in Lexington, Ky., where workers voiced some of the same concerns.

FULL story at link.

[Gman]

1. Don't complain unless

you intend to organize.

[LiberalFighter]

2. What are the wages and benefits for Toyota workers?