From NPR:
The only remaining auto manufacturing plant on the West Coast is closing Thursday, marking the end of an era in the history of automaking.
New United Motor Manufacturing Inc., also known as NUMMI, was a unique joint venture between Toyota and General Motors in Fremont, Calif., but the partnership ended when GM pulled out last year and Toyota decided to shut down the plant.
NUMMI began as an experiment to see if a unionized workers could produce under Japanese-style management, and it was Toyota’s only unionized workforce. Looks like things didn’t quite work out.
“Toyota has never shut a plant down in 73 years, and we were the only plant to get a zero-defect audit, ever, in the Toyota history,” said Ann Ezra, who worked for NUMMI for more than two decades. “Only another Lexus plant has ever done it, and they’re going to shut us down? Why? So yeah, it’s because of the union.”
Check out This American Life’s episode about NUMMI from last week. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-ar…
@1 I was just about to post that. It really is a great episode.
“If Toyota, the biggest and best automaker in the world, if they can’t make a profit there, who in the world can?” he said. “So its future as being as it was in the past is not likely.”
This same thing is bound to happen to Boeing eventually. Right now you can find great zero-defect manufacturing in America and overseas manufacturing has a reputation for lower quality but this is ending. As China get the money to invest in manufacturing something other than the cheapest product they will swallow American plants whole. Whether or not you like it this is the future ahead of us.
Tariffs?
the West Coast sucks like a mothafucka
Hey, when Winchester, Remington, and Smith & Wesson are all owned by foreign companies, it should surprise no-one that car makers aren’t far behind.
@4
doesn’t work.
other nations will get rich selling to brazil and india and china and everywhere
if we don’t compete globally we will wither and die
it’s already happening.
note: we are one nation in a bigger world, remember? those maps they showed you in high school that just show the USA without even mexico or canada, those aren’t real!
so, good luck with that whole “let’s not engage in foreign trade” thing. worked wonders for albania, too.
Unions suck like a muthafucka
Saying Toyota chose this as the sole plant to close because of the union is like saying I was singled out for teasing because I’m gay. It’s not because of the gay, it’s because of the bigotry. Look for the politically weakest and attack. NUMMI going out and proud as union was brave, so of course in a downturn Toyota’s gonna seize the chance to stomp it down. The job losses are devastating, but there’s also a price for just going along to get along, for passing.
@6 – I just checked Wikipedia and it doesn’t seem to support your claim. The problem with unions is that it puts that company at a disadvantage against a competitor that doesn’t have one. What you need are universal union benefits for all workers to level the playing field. Here in Canada we get universal free health care, a year of paid maternity leave (or paternity) etc
I agree with tariffs but only on countries that don’t share our human rights & environmental values. Free trade deals with Western style democracies (like what the EU set up) are fine.
Closing this plant had nothing to do with unions. The production capacity of this plant was used to make both Toyotas and Pontiacs. GM killed Pontiac, and pulled out of producing any of their join cars there. The model that the plant was producing (Pontiac Vibe/Toyota Matrix) was not a big seller, and needed to be replaced. So the plant had tons of extra capacity and needed to be re-tooled for another model. All of this at a time when Toyota has plenty of extra capacity throughout all it’s plants. There’s simply no argument for keeping it open. The plant’s fate was sealed as soon as GM pulled out.
@8 Yes and no. The American workers were made to feel like cogs in a wheel that contributed nothing to the company. They were forced to send defects down the line because the supervisors would die before stopping the line. As soon as they were given some investment in the product and were expected to stop the line to fix something, they took a lot more pride in the product and were happy to work harder than they were before.
It was a union shop before NUUMI and a union shop after NUUMI, so you can’t blame the laziness on the union, but on the company culture.
@11 Bingo. Unions have to negotiate for health care & pension benefits, in addition to fair wages & safe working conditions. Health care costs have been skyrocketing, and a lot of pension funds were recently vaporized. It’s just too much to have tied to your employment contract, and it inflates the cost of labour to an uncompetitive level.
Um, I don’t know about the “TAL” segment @8, but according to the NPR report, from which this post seems to have been lifted, those “lazy, do nothing, whining, obstructionist idiot” union workers were making the highest quality products in both Toyota & GM’s domestic lines – and in the process received the only “zero defects” certification of any Toyota plant in the U.S.
The failure of this experiment can be laid directly at the feet of GM management, which obstinately refused to implement many of the lessons the joint venture with Toyota was intended to instill, while it appears to be equally clear that the workers on the manufacturing line embraced those same lessons to the extent they were able, resulting in the exceptional quality of the vehicles they produced.
When the worker in the segment says, “it’s about the union”, she means, “it’s about (busting) the union”, which is of course the direct result of shutting down the only unionized plant in Toyota’s manufacturing network.
Wow–it’d be interesting to hear Michael Moore’s spin on the TAL segment.
Enigma, you’re much too nuanced for the anti-union/free trade for all crowd.
It’s a religion to them, and people don’t like their faith challenged, no matter how dumb it is.
@17 Thanks, I do find my introducing nuance into debates makes people more upset than if I just tried to demonize the other side. I have a hard time seeing in black and white, but I can say the managers of the other GM plants who didn’t learn from NUUMI were pretty big idiots.
Here I was thinking the headline meant Lindy was finally leaving.
@8’s misinterpretation of the This American Life segment is comical. Don’t worry, dude, you didn’t give anything away (except your own bias).
“Is it any wonder America is quickly slipping into third world status. “
Well, I think that people who don’t know how to use questions marks play a much bigger role in America’s decline than the 7% of the workforce that is unionized.
“Tariffs?”
Great, so we’ll be forced to drive K Cars? fuck off.
Oh how I wish you were referring to Lindy here. Too bad.