Reporting from Toyota City, Japan — All six Toyota veterans around the table agreed: The memo they were about to send to senior management could damage their careers.
The workers had recognized a troubling trend. In recent years, the automaker had kicked into high gear to fill the booming U.S. demand for smaller, more gas-efficient vehicles.
The union men had watched the company take what they believed were dangerous safety and manpower shortcuts to lower costs and boost production.
Alienating bosses could make the men company pariahs. But they knew they had to sound the alarm. From 2000 to 2005, their memo pointed out, Toyota had recalled more than 5 million cars -- 36% of all sold vehicles, a rate higher than other companies.
Toyota's failure to act, the two-page notice warned, may "become a great problem that involves the company's survival."
They added: "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."
They presented theletterto management and held their breath. But they needn't have worried. Toyota never responded.
"They completely ignored us," recalled Tadao Wakatsuki, 62, a veteran assembly line worker who formed the union. "That's the Toyota way."
Over the years, even before the recent worldwide recalls, Toyota was warned about declining product quality and worsening working conditions at its Japanese plants.
The warnings came not only from Wakatsuki's union, but from the widow of a 30-year-old Toyota worker who dropped dead at his desk and from an auto industry activist known as the Ralph Nader of Japan.
In 2008, the National Labor Committee, a U.S. human-rights advocacy group, released a 65-page report titled "The Toyota You Don't Know," detailing what it alleged were serious human-rights violations.
The report linked Toyota to human trafficking and sweatshop abuse in connection with its importing of foreign guest workers from China and Vietnam to work in its Japanese factories.
Many are pressured to work overtime without pay, the report claimed, adding that there were signs similar practices were emerging in the United States.
"Toyota is imposing its two-tier, low-wage model at its nonunion plants in the south" of the U.S., the report read, "which will result in wages and benefits being slashed across the entire auto industry."
Toyota officials said they could not confirm they received the memo but declined to comment further.
