Japan

Toyota exploiting the workforce
Toyota made US$10.5 billion clear profit in fiscal year 2004, a record the more remarkable by making Toyota the first company to surpass one trillion yen profit in a single year in Japan.

The profit is also noteworthy as it was made by selling 1.3 million fewer cars and with gross sales $22.7 billion less than the world’s biggest auto company, General Motors. According to Kamata Satoshi who worked on a Toyota production line 31 years ago, this shows that Toyota is successfully implementing cost-reduction measures.

Even including the oil and banking sectors Toyota is the fourth biggest profit producer – without those sectors, Toyota is the biggest profit maker.

Mr Kamata observes that when he worked for Toyota, his monthly wage including overtime and allowances was $720 (at today’s exchange rates); now ‘term workers’ are recruited for $2,300 a month, or an increase of about three times. An interesting perspective on this is that over the same timeframe, company profits have increased over 30 times.

Mr Kamata was one of around 3,000 ‘term workers’, but this figure has now ballooned more than three times to 10,000. The inference is clear that he believes that ‘term workers’, who were an insignificant part of the workforce in 1970, have helped make those vast profits, as well as facilitated making redundancies and redeployment of workers while workers’ share of profits has been very modest.

Mr Kamata also observes that using the term ‘employ’ in this context is inaccurate. He says, “Low-cost term employees exist not to be employed, but rather to be discarded.”

Japanese companies have pioneered ‘modern’ management techniques which now include treating office workers aged over 50 years as redundant labour, and subcontracting chains that allow parent companies no responsibility for their actual workforce while subcontractors pay less than half the rates paid to formally employed workers.

http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2004-10/20satoshi.cfm