Based on an article in the LA Times, a picture of Toyota is beginning to take shape that doesn’t quite look like the company we thought we knew. What it does look like is a company that ignores potential personal injury risks to its consumers, ignores employee concerns about safety issues, and literally works its workers to death.
According to the Times, a group of six veteran Toyota union employees sent a memo to the company’s senior management indicating that they had recognized a dangerous and troubling trend with Toyota that was putting consumers at risk for personal injuries and could damage the company fatally.
Toyota Headquarters In Japan
The memo these workers penned pointed out that from 2000 to 2005 Toyota had recalled over 5 million cars, which was 36% of Toyota vehicles sold. The memo also pointed out that the company was taking “dangerous safety and manpower shortcuts to lower costs and boost production.”
The employees feared and warned that Toyota’s failure to act on these issues would become a problem that could impact the company’s survival. The Times notes that despite the workers’ fears, Toyota never responded to the issues raised in the memo.
This was a memo that dealt with safety and personal injury issues in such a way that the authors knew it could seriously impact their careers. They believed, however, that consumer safety and personal injury issues demanded that they act.
And as shocking and alarming as the Toyota workers’ memo is, it’s not the only memo or report to recently call into question Toyota’s practices.
The National Labor Committee, a human rights advocacy organization in the U.S., issues a report in 2008 called “The Toyota You Don’t Know.” The report details human rights violations and even links Toyota to human trafficking and sweatshop style abuses of its foreign workers from China and Vietnam, according to the Times.
The report even indicates that similar abuses were starting to show up in the company’s nonunion plants in southern states in the U.S.
The allegations in the Toyota employees’ memo and the National Labor Committee’s report are serious and disturbing. And this story is more than enough to make even a loyal Toyota customer stop and take another look. But our story, and the complaints about Toyota, continues.
Enter Hiroka Uchino. According to the Times, her complaints about Toyota have very little to do with the recall. She believes that Toyota, to put it frankly, worked her husband to death.
Her husband, Kenichi Uchino, and father of their two children died at his desk at 4:30 in the morning at the age of 30. Kenichi normally worked 14 hour days and often up to 144 hours of unpaid overtime each month. A Japanese court ruled that he had died from what is known as karoshi – working himself to death.
Fumio Matsuda is known in Japan as his country’s Ralph Nadar. He has been a workplace safety and consumer advocate since the early 70s. He formed the Japan Automobile Consumer Union and is a vocal critic of Toyota’s workplace and consumer practices.
He describes Toyota as one of the most secretive companies in the world. The Times quotes Fumio as stating, “Everything Toyota does is hidden.”
Fumio describes a company that engages in secret recalls where consumers are tricked into bringing their vehicles in for check ups and the product defect is repaired the the customer is charged for the work. He also states that he believes that Toyota was aware of the product defect problems that are currently plaguing the company long before a recall was ever implemented.
In Fumio’s estimation, eventually criminal charges will be brought against the company.
