The basic structure of the auto contracts is often copied by other groups in the Midwest, including teachers, state workers, police and firefighters. Outside the Midwest, other industries often mimic some auto contract provisions as well, including the airline and steel industries.

“The UAW has blazed a lot of trails in the auto industry that have opened up in many other industries,” says Harley Shaiken, a professor of labor studies at the University of California, Berkeley. “For example, in the early 1950s, paid health care, pensions and job security were pioneered by the UAW.”

http://www.usatoday.com/money/…..-uaw_N.htm

In 2007, the Wall Street Journal noted, “Toyota Motor Company…now sets the bar for labor costs in the U.S. auto industry.” Recognition of that influence was echoed that same years by Automotive News: “Toyota is going to set the pattern for the entire industry – wages, benefits and pensions.”
Meanwhile the Big Three’s falling sales and market share have forced the American companies to adopt, and their workers to accept, two-tier wage and temporary worker schemes eerily similar to those used for years by Toyota – just to compete. And the race to the bottom seems to be just warming up. In September 2008, an internal Toyota memo leaked from its Georgetown, Kentucky plant, laid out management’s plans to cut $300 million in labor costs in its U.S. operations.

In April 2008, the Wall Street Journal reported that Toyota plans to end its practice of pegging its hourly wages to UAW rates, and will now pay new hires only 50 percent above the local prevailing wage. In Kentucky, this would mean a savings of about 12 percent, or $3.00 per worker hour – which, of course, will put even more of a squeeze on the Big Three U.S. auto companies and their unionized workforce.

The Japanese people are, in short, having an extremely hard decade.

In its zeal to “increase productivity,” Toyota presses its suppliers to produce more and more for less and less money. When there is a downturn in auto sales, the parts plants are the first to feel the pinch – and since a high percentage the workers at Toyota’s subcontract plants are temps, they are easily shed. Extensive, obligatory overtime is the rule, and it is very common for workers not to be paid correctly. For example, in one plant, workers interviewed normally worked 97-hour-weeks, typically receiving only one or two days off a month and no paid holidays. Some workers told investigators that their employers failed to pay what was owed.

Toyota’s supplier plants also make extensive use of guest or “trainee” workers – under conditions that in some respects qualify as human trafficking: The workers, most of whom come from China and Vietnam, pay manpower agencies in their home countries as much as $8,000 to $10,000 for a two- or three-year contract.
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Despite this commitment, Toyota’s foreign workers in Japan are second-class citizens. On arrival the guest workers’ passports are confiscated. During the first year as “trainees,” they are not covered by Japan’s labor or minimum wage laws. They work alongside Japanese workers, putting in the same long hours, but often earning less than half the minimum wage – as little as $2.76 an hour, or $479 a month. As guest workers, they are required to remain with the same employer – no matter how bad the working conditions – and to live in the company housing assigned to them – even though some are charged twice what their Japanese colleagues pay for comparable accommodations. Any worker who tries to change jobs, or who complains about conditions may be forcibly deported. By the time food, housing, and taxes are deducted, some guest workers end up earning less than $600 for an entire year, according to several advocacy organizations and unions that work with subcontract plant temp and guest workers.
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Toyota Tsusho (together with Suzuki) is working with the military-run Myanmar Auto and Diesel Industries (MADI) in the manufacture and sale of vehicles – including, presumably, vehicles used by the military. This collaboration with the military lends support to continued repression, the impoverishment of the Burmese people, and a broad pattern of human rights violation. In September 2007, according to the U.S. State Department, “the Burmese Government brutally cracked down on peaceful demonstrators, using gunfire, rubber bullets, batons, and tear gas against them and those observing in the vicinity. The authorities killed at least 30 people during the crackdown and arrested more than 3,000.”

http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=15182