"Knowledge about government is power" --GovTrack
Toyota Prius: Just Another Slave-Labor Produced Pile of Nuts & Bolts. Toyota works factory worker to death to reach #1
In the 60s it was, ‘turn on, tune in, and drop out’.
In 2008 it it should be, ‘buy a horse, grow your own food, and go off-grid’ (*more off-grid references at the end of this post).
Toyota is no better or different than any other whore of the Corporatocracy. Our own government even became a car dealer for a time. The EPA rated the Prius at 60 Miles Per Gallon when it knew damn-well it was 48 at-best, in order to help hustle the car to consumers.
Here are some excerpts from a report in ‘In These Times’ with my own emphasis added:
[snip]
The report alleges that Toyota exploits guest workers, mostly shipped in from China and Vietnam. According to the NLC, these workers are “stripped of their passports and often forced to work — including at subcontract plants supplying Toyota — 16 hours a day, seven days a week, while being paid less than half the legal minimum wage.” Workers are forced to live in company dormitories and deported for complaining about poor treatment, the report finds.
Low-wage temporary workers make up one-third of Toyota’s Prius assembly-line workers, mostly in the auto-parts supply chain. They are signed to contracts for periods as short as four months, and are paid only 60 percent of a full-time employee’s wage.
Parts plants run by subcontractors advertise standard, nine-hour, five-day-a-week jobs. But according to the NLC, “the typical shift was 15 to 16.5 hours a day, from 8:30 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. or 1:00 a.m.”
In 2002, Kenichi Uchino, 30, died while working at the “green” Tsutsumi plant that assembles the Prius. During the 13th hour of a routine 14-hour day, Uchino collapsed on the shop floor of the internationally lauded “sustainable” factory, which uses sulfur-oxide-eating paint and boasts 5 percent emissions reductions. A Japanese court ruled that Uchino’s death was caused by exhaustion from overwork.
His wife, Hiroko Uchino, described a grueling lifestyle that included an 85-hour workweek prior to his death. The NLC published his time cards, which reveal that he was “putting in 106.5 to 155 hours of overtime … in the 30 days leading up to his death.”
Much of this overtime went unpaid. (Toyota explained Kenichi’s extra hours as “voluntary quality control activities,” says the report.) But in court, his survivors were able to win pension payments.
The NLC also alleges that Toyota — through its subsidiary Toyota Tsusho — has joint business ventures with Burma’s military regime. The charges arise from an agreement between Tsusho, Suzuki and the junta to set up parts and material plants in Burma, and produce vehicles for the military government. These ties remain despite a 2001 declaration from the company that it ended contracts with the Burmese government.
In the wake of the report, the company wrote a letter to stockholders: “Toyota has carefully considered the current environment in Burma, has conveyed to Toyota Tsusho Corporation its concerns about that environment, and has asked Toyota Tsusho to reconsider its business activities in the country.” As the largest owner of Tsusho’s stock (more than a third), Toyota itself has a role to play in cutting these ties.
The NLC report also connects the company’s overseas misdeeds to the American economy. Millions of dollars in car parts shipped by Toyota Tsusho are received by Tsusho America, which distributes them to Toyota assembly plants in the American South. This influx of foreign auto infrastructure uses an overwhelming ratio of non-union labor, fueling the diminution of union density in the auto sector.
What’s more, a memo leaked from Toyota’s Georgetown, Ky., plant to the New York Times in late 2007, exposed “management’s plans to cut $300 million in labor costs across Toyota’s North American operations over the next three years.” To do this, Toyota plans to introduce tiered wage scales and reduced health benefits for U.S. Toyota workers, which should come as little surprise to an American auto workforce that has suffered similar attacks from Detroit’s Big Three manufacturers for the past three decades.
As NLC Director Charles Kernaghan says, if Hollywood celebrities — such as actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz — can popularize green driving, they can also help end Toyota’s sweatshop labor regime and its ties to Burma’s dictatorship.
[snip]
Read the whole thing here:
The Dark Side of the Toyota Prius
As an aside, have you ever driven behind a Prius driver? Have you noticed that driving green appears to be synonymous with driving stupid? Like getting stuck behind a Volvo or Buick. Sheez! Besides, it’ll eventually break-down and rust away just like every other heap out there will.
Anyway, WE-THE-PEOPLE are getting screwed at every turn; proof that the Corporatocracy has taken over even our government.
Politicians and candidates from both political parties are guilty. It isn’t Democrats and Liberals or Progressives versus Republican’ts and Conservatives or right-wing-nuts anymore. It’s bigger. It is the Corporatocracy versus WE-THE-PEOPLE.
Oh, WE-THE-PEOPLE will be marginally better-off with Democrats in charge than Repukes, to be sure. And the Green Party, and the Libertarians’ are inconsequential.
Our Democracy is at risk. Nope, in peril. I think that the way to end the whole Blue versus Red division is to get our heads outta our collective asses and unite as WE-THE-PEOPLE to stop the nonsense of the Corporatocracy from finishing us off. Time is running out, folks. The damage is real and it is significant.
Besides the immediate need to vote for more Democrats, WE-THE-PEOPLE need to vote with our wallets and purse strings. Slow the consumerism; start a victory garden, shop food Co-ops and farmers’ markets, and go off-grid as humanly possible. Don’t wait for some politician to ride in and save your day.
Tune your televisions to Bill Moyers’s Journal and watch interviews with the likes of Author and Journalist William Greider:
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/07182008/watch2.html
In short, get off your complacent rumps and get into the game. Already calling and writing Congress, or letters to the editors, or volunteering for some campaigns? Those traditional methods are great. But, not enough. If your voice is not being heard, make it louder and stronger by adding it to the millions of others who are joining forces with groups like Working America, Common Cause, Center for America Progress, Apollo Alliance, Campaign for America’s Future. Get at least some of your news from sources like: Think Progress, AmericaBlog, Mother Jones, NPR, PBS, In These Times, Free Press, Public Citizen, Media Matters for America, The Raw Story, TruthOut.org, MoveOn.org, ThomasPaine.com, AlterNet.org, Electronic Frontier Foundation, VoteVets.org, ThePumpHandle, DMIBlog, and of course BloggerRadio.com. If you are not up for posting to a Blog of your own, visit and comment on others. Share what you discover with others via your own Blog or just via E-Mail. Get ‘em interested and involved, or at least awake. Fight against DIS-information campaigns by spreading more truths (Obama is Christian) etc.
REMEMBER a few things:
"The most important political office is that of the private citizen."--Louis D. Brandeis
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." --Margaret Mead
“The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.”--Dante Alighieri
“Those who stand for nothing fall for anything.”—Alexander Hamilton
“Bad politicians are sent to Washington by good people who don't vote.”--William E. Simon
“The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them.”—Albert Einstein
“Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber.”—Plato
“Democracy is when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers.”—Aristotle
“Not until the creation and maintenance of decent conditions of life for all people are recognized and accepted as a common obligation of all people and all countries - not until then shall we, with a certain degree of justification, be able to speak of humankind as civilized.”—Albert Einstein
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