Toyota Linked to Human Trafficking and Worker Abuse?

Could be politically motivated. You can't judge labor practices in foreign countries vs the standards here.

 

The issuers of the report appear to be an organization genuinely interested in workers rights, and working against slavery or near-slavery conditions in international trade. They are the same people who embarrassed Kathy Lee Gifford by exposing the sweatshop manufacture of her line of clothing. They are not listed in SourceWatch, a site that tracks funding for mouthpiece organizations. But neither are they listed in charitynavigator.org, a good site for checking the credentials of charitable organizations. My first take on this is that it's a legitimate concern. My second take is that, probably, given that most manufacture is in low-wage countries, you'd expose at least some of the same thing no matter which car maker you chose. Although perhaps not the link to the Burmese (sic) dictatorship.

It's clear from the press release that they chose Toyota because of the Prius -- they call on the same stars that promoted the Prius for green reasons now to come out for cleaning up sweatshop and slave labor conditions in international trade. It's not clear to me at this point that Toyota is noticeable worse than others, just that Toyota was chosen for the Prius hook. Arguably, it's the same strategy as exposing Gifford's sweatshop workers instead of everybody else's sweatshop workers. Point a finger at any imported goods from that part of the world and it's pretty good odds there is at least some subsistence wage work behind the low price. No magic there.

The report itself is ... too much a collection of anecdotes for me to take in all at once. I mean, it's hard to do a systematic evaluation of a manufacturer for these issues, but there are a lot of vignettes of particular abuses.

The "link to human trafficking" part, for example, describes the overall conditions of Chinese guestworkers in Japan, along with their number. And notes that several (23) Totota parts suppliers were cited for violations of the laws regarding pay and treatment for guest workers. So they do appear to have some facts on the table. It's not clear whether the abuses cited in general, for guest workers, are the same magnitude as the abuses by the Totota parts suppliers in particular. But they do a pretty good job of tarring them all with the same brush.

After skimming the report, my take is still pretty much the same. This is the way the world works now. They could choose almost any manufacturer, turn over some Asian manufacturing rocks and see what crawled out. Toyota was chosen for impact. And possibly because Toyota might plausibly do something about it to maintain a good image in the US and elsewhere.

 

I'd need to see this from more than an American union article where most unionised workers in the automotive industry work for the big 3.

I'm not knocking unions, I am a unionist.

 

I would want investigation by a third party without an ax to grind. This American union is getting it's lunch eaten by Toyota because the American big 3 are making SUV's and cars with lousy economy. They probably see Toyota as the enemy who is taking jobs away and indeed Ford and others are dropping jobs and closing plants. But this is not because of Toyota- this is because American car makers are making big fast gas eaters that are now too expensive for most to own.

Toyota spent a lot of money for a long time to get this Hybrid technology running. They deserve the rewards now.

As for sweat shops? A lot of US car parts are made in Mexico now. Wanna guess what kind of labor practices are doing that work? It's no different.

 

The union article is making statements based on what??
Where are the dates/times/names/places and other factual information from which such truthful statements come?

It's one thing to make broad statements, it's another to back them up with undeniable facts. Is Mr. Uchino's death prevalent among Toyota's workers? Was Mr. Uchino severly dehydrated or did his boss flog him to death?

I'd like to know the location of the secret stash of private information that the Union dips into to get these conclusions. If it's for real, Mr. Uchino's case notwithstanding, then let loose the floodgate of information and let the chips fall where they may.

ZC1

 

I'm really against this sweat shop crap. I think they ought to hire assembly line workers with a third grade education. They should give them $80k per year, great medical benefits, and give them a huge pension and medical benefits when they retire. While working they should not be asked to work hard and should be able to take breaks whenever desired. They should not be able to get fired and if they are a real bad worker you should be forced to give them a few years salary and some great benefits to send them out the door. Ohh wait a minute the big three already does than for their workers. Never mind.

 

I've read the report a little more closely now. It's not well written. There are some facts and citations as to source, but mostly its case studies and vignettes. With a lot of repetition. They definitely did some homework, but ... it's hard to say whether Toyota is qualitatively different from any other Japanese car maker (or manufacturer) in this regard. Interesting to see that the Japanese appear to be stressing out/killing off their middle class as fast as we are here. Beyond that it's hard to make any judgment based on this advocacy piece. Other than, as I said earlier, this is the way the world works these days.

 

MSNBC has documented slave labor & other abuses in the US and a few other countries. One can not apply American standards worldwide. In many other countries there is no minimum wage, no paid vacation, no workmans comp, no unemployment insurance. Nike makes shoes in Vietnam because it is legal to pay children next to nothing (in US$) to do so. Mexicans pour into the USA because they are paid more to pick crops here compared to wages in Mexico. Union Carbide built a chemical plant upwind of a poor Indian village because there weren't any environmental restrictions there. Walmart gets busted for labor law violations and just pays the fine because it is cheaper than compliance. Corporations exploit workers and for the most part the workers tolerate it.

I believe this organization's assertions are plausible.

 

One question: Where is another article corroborating this one? And not just another writer copying what they read in this article.

 

The Japanese guest worker program has been discussed in a lot of other credible sources. For example, here's the BBC quoting the US State Department, last year:

BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Japan scheme 'abuses foreign workers'

"The US state department has gone further. In its annual report on human trafficking, it said that "some migrant workers are reportedly subjected to conditions of forced labour through [its] foreign trainee programme".

As I said above, while the original report provided adequate documentation that Toyota parts suppliers use guest workers in this program, I don't think they showed that a) Toyota's suppliers were the most abusive or b) that Toyota is any different from any other Japanese manufacturer. Other than by anecdote.

I then tried even to understand what the current US guestworker program is like, and couldn't even get the details to compare it to the Japanese system. But I'm pretty sure we don't (yet) force the guestworkers to turn over their passports or (at least officially) allow guesworkers be locked into isolated compounds as a condition of employment. Far as I can tell, at present, our guestworker program is just a visa process, at least on paper. So I guess it's probably less prone to abuse and expoitation than the Japanese system, though, as with all things like this, it's hard to find systematic evidence to prove it or disprove it. But at least for now, I think that guestworkers here, if they have the financial means, can leave without having to beg for their employer for their passport.

 

If people would be deported if they don't work hard enough as the article states, getting your passport back isn't so hard.

I find this hard to believe after reading about quality work practises within Toyota and it's suppliers. Good working conditions and quality go hand in hand.

 

As an economist, I'll say one more thing about the whole exploitation of guest workers issue. Sometimes a really awful job is better than no job at all. To the extent that the guest workers freely chose their awful jobs over their alternatives, well, the conditions in their current workplaces are more an indication of their awful circumstances in general. So in those cases it's not clear that (e.g.) making those awful jobs go away would actually improve the lot of the exploited guest worker. They might have to go from their awful job to even worse circumstances back in their native country. But a lot of this essentially works out to be bait and switch, and devolves into de-facto slavery. At that point, the free market arguments above (should) go right out the window. What you're seeing is not the result of free and informed choice, it's extortion plain and simple. It may be difficult for us, with our US standard of living, to separate out those two cases.

That leaves aside the entire moral element of the discussion. Most people have no idea that outright, actual, literal slavery still exists. By contrast, some people (though by no means all) feel uncomfortable at the though of consuming products produced by slave labor. For example, there have been a series of agreements signed by the major cocoa producers and the governments of cocoa producing nations, to eliminate slave labor in the production of cocoa. My assumption is that the taint of slavery was cutting into sales a bit, as there had been a pretty widespread campaign to make known the use of slave labor in cocoa production. Whether or not literal slavery was as widespread as was alleged, the perception of eating a luxury produced with (any) slave labor was enough to turn some people off, to the point where the chocolate producers were willing to act. My takeaway is that free markets will sometimes produce some upper bound on the amount of slave-labor inputs to production, due to consumers preferences to avoid slave-produced commodities. But there has to be a widespread and well-documented problem before that mechanism will work.


BBC News | AFRICA | Pact to end African 'chocolate slavery'


Once you realize that at least some people are unwilling to purchase luxury goods tainted by slave labor, it's only a short step to realizing that some people even object to items produced with the worst sweatshop or debt bondage working conditions. So, again, producers' decisions will reflect the average "morality" of the consuming public. Some people will even object if other people buy goods produced that way.

And, again quite logically, if nobody much cares where their goods come from, as long as they are cheap, it's only rational to expect slavery, debt bondage, sweatshops and similar conditions to emerge. It would be an amazement if competitive free markets didn't produce that result, as one key attribute of markets is that, for a given output, producers are forced to produce at lowest possible average cost. If you don't use (e.g.) debt bondage, your competitor will, and you'll no longer be in business.

So from a market point of view, we, as a nation, long ago passed laws to prevent the worst sort of abuses. Out of our own self-interest. Because the markets, by themselves, are driven to do those things when there is a pool of labor available. Because most consumers are indifferent to how their goods are produced. Similar, imho, to our environmental laws. We passed them to protect ourselves, because individual self-interest was not an adequate way to assure a reasonably healthy environment. International trade (in theory) allows nations to compete to their best comparative advantage, that's the plus side, and that's where the focus remains on globalization. But it also means that (at least some of) our cheap goods embody labor conditions that we would not allow here. We don't allow slavery in this country, but we do sometimes import the products of it.

Still have no idea what relevance this has to Toyota in particular. Just wanted to get across the idea that you could find what appears to us to be abusive labor conditions in pretty much any line of goods you'd care to look at. As far as I can tell, the only place where consumer preferences are enough to draw a line is where there is well-advertised use of outright slave labor. Other than that, just about anything goes. Even if this story were 100% correct in every particular, and Toyota aggressively undertook to use the most abusive practices possible as a means of controlling costs, I'd bet the impact on US Toyota sales would be negligible. If we don't care, why should they?

 

This won't be the 1st Time PR Newswire belched out Phoney Stories:

SEC Opens Probe of a Fake News Release - Investor Relations - CFO.com

Their excuse usually goes something like this: "Well, we aren't real journalists anyway ... we just buy the story from others ... you know .. outsourcing"

 

Fair point, but note that it wasn't Toyota proper with regard to the use of guestworkers, it was Toyota's suppliers, and it was upholstery in particular that was highlighted in that report (ie, not technical work at all, but stitching, which is classic sweatshop work.) Plus some mention of forming of small metal stampings. I'm no expert on auto making, but my understanding is that, far more than US makers do, the Japanese makers, for purchase of components, set the spec and the price, and leave it up to the suppliers as to how to meet the spec and the price. If, as stated in the document, Totota was in the middle of a long cost-cutting drive, it would not surprise me to see some suppliers scraping the bottom of the barrel/going over the line to get those savings.

Again, I don't think it's any different from any other manufacture these days. They picked Toyota for the impact of the Prius, pure and simple. That's why they plastered the Prius on the cover and plastered the faces of US stars that endorsed the Prius all over the report.

 

I find this sort of funny, really. The reason the NLC makes such a big point of the Prius is that quite a few of these stars mentioned bought the car as a statement that it, at least partly, political. Now one gets to ask them about their stances on human rights. I didn't read about this from the source that was originally mentioned in this thread, I read it from another car forum. Specifically, one where they don't typically have nice things to say about Toyota, anyway. Once you boil away the union bias, you are still left with substantial issues to chew on, it seems.

Meanwhile, the reaction I've been sensing here is to fob some of this off, if not all of it as union propaganda, while continuing to harp on Wal-Mart.

I tend to see us, as a people, this way. We decided we wanted people (ours, at least) to have a income that allow them at least a modicum of dignity in their life(minimum wage laws, unions). We decided that we want a cleaner environment(environmental regulations). In our decision to have the cheapest goods possible, we decided that the previous two items aren't terribly important, after all, and buy goods made in lands that ignore both of these issues, among others. How very sincere that is...

 

I wouldn't be surprised if there is some truth to the allegations. However, I doubt its any different than what goes on all over the world, including here in our own country. Toyota and the Prius' popularity just give the opportunity for someone to get noticed. Kind of like when Greenpeace went after Apple owing to the huge popularity of the ipods a while back. Apple's practices were no worse than anyone else's in the same industry, but they made a high profile target to get some attention. I think both causes have their merits, but not really a fan of this tactic of singling out one popular offender.


Rob

 

you sound like a Ronald Reagan child. someone who grew up buying into the anti-union propaganda of the day. nothing destroyed the big 3 except their bad management, and an obsession with making stock holders happy

 

Irony, it's so....ironic.

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