Not to be holier than thou, I understand why its cool to drive a Prius–rented one recently on a trip and loved that gas mileage. Clean for the environment, easy on the wallet–what’s not to like? How about this: Your Prius is being made by workers who are being driven to the brink of collapse–and, in at least one documented case, to death. And in this story is a vexing question: how do we "green" the environment AND make sure that we still have decent work, too?
So, here’s the story, as uncovered by my friends at the National Labor Committee, who give a lot of detail in a report to some things we generally know about life in industrial Japan. If you are a full-time worker at Toyota, which produces the Prius, you can make a decent middle-class livelihood by Japanese standards. But:
A full one-third, or 10,000 Toyota assembly line workers, are low wage temp and subcontract workers who earn less than 60 percent of what full time workers do. Temps have few rights and are hired under contracts as short as four months.
And, slowly, but surely, those ranks are expanding. And, whether you are full-time or a temp, work can be grueling:
As soon as he graduated from high school at age 17, Kenichi Uchino went to work for Toyota in April 1989. This had always been his dream. He grew up in Toyota City, where both his father and grandfather worked at Toyota plants. As a child he loved washing his father’s Toyota.
At 4:20 a.m. on Saturday morning, February 9, 2002—13 hours into his typical 14-hour night shift at the Toyota Prius plant, 30-year-old Kenichi Uchino suddenly collapsed. He was taken to the hospital where, twenty minutes later, he was pronounced dead. He left behind a young wife, a three-year-old daughter and a one-year-old son. The court in Nagoya City, Japan ruled that Mr. Uchino’s death was due to overwork at the Toyota Prius plant and ordered the Labor Ministry and Toyota to pay the family a pension so that the children would not suffer any more than they already had.
And:
At Toyota, workers alternate shifts every other week, from day to night and back again. On the day shift, it was routine for Mr. Uchino to work 13, 14 or 15 hours a day, from 5:40 a.m. to 7:30, 8:00 or 9:00 p.m., often six days a week. The week before his death, he worked 82 hours on the day shift—85 hours, if you count the three hours of home work he did on Sunday. On the night shift, the week he died, Kenichi was working 70 hours, putting in a typical 14-hour shift, from 3:20 p.m. to 5:20 a.m. five days a week. When he worked the night shift, he left home at around 2:00 p.m. and often did not return until 7:00 a.m., just as his wife was getting up. Including his commute—-he drove a Toyota-—he was out of the house 17 hours a day. He was sleeping just four or five hours a night. When he got home, he was often too tired to play with his children or eat with his family and would immediately collapse into bed.
This is a wealthy corporation, by the way: its profits for the fiscal year ending March 31st 2008 were $16.7 billion–a far cry from the financial woes besetting Ford, Chrysler and General Motors.
And, having surpassed General Motors as the largest auto company in the world, it is spreading its model across the world. By setting up plants in the more non-union South, Toyota has undercut the basic standards set by the United Auto Workers, paying a package that is 30 percent lower than what an auto worker makes in a union job.
Toyota is also linked to human trafficking:
In the last ten years, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of foreign guest workers employed in Aichi Prefecture, home to Toyota and the country’s auto industry. The surge of poor foreign guest workers coincides with Toyota’s ten year plan to slash the price it is willing to pay its auto part suppliers.
And:
Foreign guest workers are not only stripped of their passports—-one of the most serious of all human rights violations—-they are also prohibited from leaving the factory they are contracted to, or even changing the housing they are assigned. If a guest worker dares change jobs or moves, he or she will be immediately and forcibly deported. Moreover, if guest workers even dare to complain about the abusive and illegal conditions, they will also be deported. (A knowledgeable source in Japan explained that the country’s immigration officials are "very tough," making it quite easy to have guest workers deported.) This is human trafficking at its worst, as it is only the right to relocate to better factories and more decent housing that would isolate and expose the most abusive sweatshops. The inability to move to new housing also leaves the guest workers in a very vulnerable position, where they are easily cheated and forced to pay wildly excessive rents.
There is a lot more in this report. You get the picture.
The point is: There has been a historical problem when it comes to the dual challenges of getting our environment cleaned up, on the one hand, and making sure that workers get treated decently, on the other hand. The two worlds of advocates for one or other other issue have not always communicated very well. That is changing–slowly.
The biggest challenge, moving forward, is, that in the rush to "green" our planet, workers are not trampled. Meaning, that in order to be "cleaner" companies aren’t allowed to simply pass off the costs of "greening", with societal acceptance–either active or passive–in the form of lower wages or cuts in basic benefits like health care and pensions. We can do both. But, we have to be vigilant that standards are high in both worlds.
