Although the domestic automakers are shuttering factories and handing out pink slips like it’s Halloween in the wake of the current economic downturn, Toyota is bucking the trend and refuses to lay off 4,500 of its truck factory workers. Toyota’s Princeton, Indiana, and San Antonio, Texas, truck plants have been idle since August 8th, but Toyota has found plenty of activities to keep its workers busy.
Instead of building trucks and SUVs, the workers are now undergoing training, taking classes on safety and corporate history and are even doing some community work – such as cleaning up graffiti and planting flowers.
Although the downtime does allow for more advanced training which should lead to a more skilled U.S. workforce, it isn’t coming cheap. According to Automotive News, keeping all 4,500 workers on the payroll is costing Toyota at least $50 million, and that isn’t even including lost revenue from the idled plants.
“We’re not just keeping people on the payroll because we’re nice,” Latondra Newton, general manager of Toyota’s Team Member Development Center, told Automotive News. “At the end of all this, our hope is that we’ll end up with a more skilled North American work force.”
However, not all of Toyota’s workers are happy about the situation. Future products are doled out based on workforce skill, so the truck factory workers will have a leg up on the rest of Toyota’s U.S. workforce. To compensate, Toyota is currently working on a plan to cycle its U.S. workforce through new training, using the truck workers to fill in at busier production plants.
The move to retain all 4,500 workers does show a solid bit of goodwill from Toyota – to workers as well as the community – which could quell rumblings of unionizing Toyota plants.
