Toyota counters union wage request

[Omaha Steve]

Source: Bloomberg

By Craig Trudell and Hideki Asai

Tokyo - Toyota Motor Corporation, which makes more profit than all other Japanese carmakers combined, will offer to raise wages by one-third less than what its labour union requested.

The automaker’s management is proposing a 4 000 yen ($33) monthly wage increase, Yasuyuki Takagi, a spokesman for the Toyota Motor Workers’ union, said by phone. Workers will decide by March 31 whether to accept the offer, which falls short of the union’s 6 000 yen demand, he said.

Toyota rebuffed its union’s biggest proposed increase since 1998, saying labour costs would have risen by about 20 billion yen. The pushback by management underscores how labour groups and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government are struggling to pressure Japan’s biggest companies to share more of the record profits they’re earning due to a weak yen and pull the country out of its prolonged deflation.

“Despite the generally upbeat mood surrounding wages, it is difficult to see stable” inflation of 2 percent as targeted by the Bank of Japan, Kyohei Morita, an economist at Barclays in Tokyo, wrote on Monday in a report.

FULL story at link.



Read more: http://www.iol.co.za/business/companies/toyota-counters-union-wage-request-1.1832217#.VQa2D47F-So

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Toyota fights tooth and nail against it's USA plants unionizing.

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

1. Still, two thirds of a requested increase is a lot better than 0 increase, which is what they'd

have if there was no union to even make that request.

[cstanleytech]

2. True but if I was the workers I would still pushback for something else like

for every million dollars that the company worldwide records in gross profit each worker gets 1 share of voting stock.

[Amishman]

4. i take it you did not do the math

338,000 employees
$137 per share price

so you want them to pay out $46.3 million for every $1 million in profit???

[cstanleytech]

5. Hmmm you have point, maybe they could make it non voting stock or

make it so that for every x amount the employee earns the company will give them a share.

[ibewlu606]

3. kicked

The push back by Toyota management in Japan is a direct result of American workers not standing up for themselves, and now it is a race to the bottom to see who can exploit workers the fastest.