Toyota ignored warnings on safety problems from its own assembly union
March 10th, 2010 joshua
Six veteran assembly workers with Toyota Motor Corp. warned company executives in 2006 that meeting production demands came at the cost of customer safety.
According to a Los Angeles Times report, the six workers feared for their much-appreciated jobs as they penned the memo, pointing out that 36 percent of all the cars they helped make were recalled from 2000 to 2005.
U.S. demand for Toyota’s seemingly more fuel efficient vehicles caused a boom for the company, but skimping on costs to make the extra vehicles was clearly putting consumer lives at risk. These workers knew that and decided to sound the alarm.
They wrote: “We are concerned about the processes which are essential for producing safe cars, but that ultimately may be ignored, with production continued in the name of competition.”
Fortunately for those workers, but not so for consumers, Toyota executives completely ignored the memo. Millions more Toyota vehicles were assembled and sold in the U.S. and around the globe. The company’s profits soared and it soon became the world’s largest auto maker.
One of the workers who penned the memo said the company used to check every single vehicle for safety and quality, but during the booming years, that rate dropped to about 60 percent.
However, most of those cars, it appears, are defective in one or more of many ways. At least eight million vehicles have been recalled due to one or several defects which causes the vehicle to accelerate out-of-control.
Since that series of recalls related to that defect have been made, numerous reports of cars not covered by those recalls suffering the same defect have been reported. Cars receiving the believed fix to that problem have also been accelerating out-of-control again.
