Toyota deal bad for workers

By Joe Atkins

The 70-year-old photographs tell the story of the American labor movement as clearly as any thousand-page tome. United Auto Workers leader Walter Reuther and three fellow organizers stand on the overpass at the entrance to the Ford River Rouge auto plant in Dearborn, Mich., where they plan to distribute leaflets. Approaching them are the burly, armed, fedora-wearing thugs of the notorious "Service Department," murderers, kidnappers, and rumrunners hired by Henry Ford and right-hand man Harry Bennett to keep the union at bay.
As newspaper photographers snap away, dozens of Ford's men proceed to attack and beat the four labor organizers into a bloody mess. Then they turn on the journalists, slugging, blacking eyes, and grabbing most of their cameras and film.

Coming just five months after the equally infamous "Battle of the Running Bulls" at the General Motors plant in Flint, Mich., the "Battle of the Overpass" was the Gettysburg of the U.S. automobile industry's thug-led resistance to the UAW, whose members dug in their heels and ultimately won a long and hard-fought war to gain a place for autoworkers in the American middle class. After the UAW's founding in 1935, autoworker wages rose from $1,150 a year to more than $54,000 a year.

With the coming of "Detroit South" over the past decade, however, and the more recent revelation that industry leader Toyota plans to pay wages in line with "state manufacturing" rather than "US Auto Industry" rates at its new plant near Tupelo, the sacrifices Reuther and others made in the 1930s may be coming to naught. "It is frightening how close these corporations are to turning the clock backwards by decades," says Frank White, assistant director of UAW's National Organizing Department in Detroit.

The latest blow to autoworkers' increasingly shaky hold to middle class status came in the form of an internal Toyoto report written by Seiichi Sudo, chief of the company's North American operations who announced plans to build a $1.3 billion, 2,000-worker assembly plant in the Tupelo area.

Leaked to the UAW and media by Toyota workers, the acronym-laden report, replete with the Japanese phrasing known as "Toyota speak", calls for reducing labor costs by $300 million by 2011, giving workers company-cost-saving "consumer driven" health care options, as well as aligning wages with state rather than industry-wide levels.

What concerns UAW's Frank White is the downward pull on manufacturing wages as a whole that an industry giant like Toyota can have. "Now that they're at the top of the heap, (they are) wanting to increase their profits through decreasing wages and benefits."

Still, industry recruiters like David Rumbarger of the Tupelo-based Community Development Foundation believe they don't need unions to give them a voice in such matters. "Part of the reason they (Toyota) came South is because of that ability to get on union manufacturing performance," Rumbarger says. "Mississippi workers ... don't need unions to negotiate their contract."
That's what Henry Ford and Harry Bennett kept telling Walter Reuther about Ford workers, but he just wouldn't listen.