Guest Column
New auto industry leaders continue policies that hurt all workers

By JOE ATKINS

OXFORD, Miss. – The 70-year-old photographs tell the story of the American labor movement as clearly as any thousand-page tome.

UAW leader Walter Reuther and three fellow organizers stand on the overpass at the entrance to the Ford River Rouge auto plant in Dearborn, Mich., where they plan to distribute leaflets. Approaching them are the burly, armed, fedora-wearing thugs of the notorious “Service Department,” murderers, kidnappers and rumrunners hired by Henry Ford and right-hand man Harry Bennett to keep the union at bay.

As newspaper photographers snap away, dozens of Ford’s men proceed to attack and beat the four labor organizers into a bloody mess. Then they turn on the journalists, slugging, blackening eyes and grabbing most — but not all — of their cameras and film.

Coming just five months after the equally infamous “Battle of the Running Bulls” at the General Motors plant in Flint, Mich., the “Battle of the Overpass” was the Gettysburg of the U.S. automobile industry’s thug-led resistance to the UAW, whose members dug in their heels and ultimately won a long and hard-fought war to gain a place for autoworkers in the American middle class.

With the coming of “Detroit South” over the past decade, however, and the more recent revelation that industry leader Toyota plans to pay wages in line with “state manufacturing” rather than “U.S. auto industry” rates at its new plant near Tupelo, Miss., the sacrifices Reuther and others made in the 1930s may be coming to naught. “It is frightening how close these corporations are to turning the clock backward by decades,” says Frank White, assistant director of UAW’s National Organizing Department in Detroit.

The latest blow to autoworkers’ increasingly shaky hold to middle-class status came in the form of an internal Toyoto report written by Seiichi Sudo, chief of the company’s North American operations and most prominent of the Toyota elite who came to Tupelo in February 2007 to announce plans to build a $1.3 billion, 2,000-worker assembly plant in the area.

Obtained by the Detroit Free Press, the acrotnym-laden report, replete with the Japanese phrasing known as “Toyota speak,” calls for reducing labor costs by $300 million by 2011, giving workers company cost-saving “consumer driven” health care options, as well as aligning wages with state rather than industry-wide levels. The use of temporary workers is another factor in company plans.

For future workers at Toyota in Mississippi, this means wages significantly less than the $26 an hour-plus a UAW worker can earn after three years on the job. Toyota spokesman Mike Goss says the Mississippi plant likely will pay about $20 an hour after eight to 18 months on the job. The average manufacturing wage in Lee County ranges from $15.70 an hour for unskilled workers to $18 an hour for skilled workers. Wages at Nissan’s plant in Canton have ranged from as low as $12.50 per hour for beginning workers to around $19 after three years.

What concerns the UAW’s White is the downward pull on manufacturing wages as a whole that an industry giant like Toyota can have. “Now that they’re at the top of the heap, (they are) wanting to increase their profits through decreasing wages and benefits,” he said.

Toyota, whose operating profits have doubled in the past four years, reported $4 billion in profits in the second fiscal quarter of 2007, an 11 percent hike. In 2006, it chalked up an all-time record of $15 billion in profits. Meanwhile, General Motors lost $39 billion in the last quarter, the second largest such loss in U.S. history. Toyota’s profits didn’t stop Mississippi from doling out $323.9 million in incentives to land the plant, which University of Mississippi economist William Shughart calls “an improper use of the taxpayers’ money” that is supposed to “be used for broad public benefit.”

When do company profits trickle down to the workers — or “team members,” as Toyota officials like to refer to them? Certainly “team members” have no real say in decisions about wages, benefits working conditions. Still, industry recruiters like David Rumbarger of the Tupelo-based Community Development Foundation believe they don’t need unions to give them a voice in such matters.

“Part of the reason they (Toyota) came to the South is because of that ability to get nonunion manufacturing performance,” Rumbarger says. “Mississippi workers …don’t need unions to negotiate their contract.”

That’s what Henry Ford and Harry Bennett kept telling Walter Reuther about Ford workers, but he just wouldn’t listen.

(Joe Atkins is a professor of journalism at the University of Mississippi. This column originally appeared in the Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, Miss., and the Hattiesburg American in Hattiesburg, Miss.)