At Toyota, a worker oasis
Pioneer Press ^ | 04.15.06 | STEPHEN FRANKLIN





PRINCETON, Ind. - Janet Greenwell and her husband, Richard, scraped by for
years.

Now they live in a 4,000-square-foot brick house, their income has grown 40
percent and Janet can stay home to care for their two kids.

Their improved lifestyle descended upon them like a pale white spaceship,
which is exactly what Toyota's massive auto plant looks like and where
Richard Greenwell now works.

"You feel as if you just hit the lottery and you are blessed," she said.

The existence of the auto plant, plopped in the middle of a windswept
cornfield, separates this southwest corner of Indiana from a state battered
by factory closings. The plant also separates this area from much of the
Midwest, which is in the midst of yet another painful retrenchment of the
unionized auto industry, perhaps the greatest downsizing in Detroit's
history.

That trend has hit home in St. Paul - where the Ford Motor Co. plans to
close its 1,900-employee Ranger truck factory because of dwindling sales of
the compact pickup - the only vehicle the plant makes. The closure was
announced Thursday.

In stark contrast, the Toyota factory provides thousands of jobs with
paychecks of $60,000 and more a year, company-paid health, dental and vision
insurance, a pension plan and a 401(k) and on and on.

For some, whose only options before were low-paying jobs, working in the
mines or moving elsewhere, it is as if the Japanese company had planted an
ATM in a field and invited them to use it at the company's expense.

As General Motors Corp., Ford and parts suppliers to those companies shutter
factories and slash employment, the new American auto industry is sprouting
up in far different places than Detroit. This new industry includes the
foreign competitors who aren't saddled with the huge costs associated with
the domestic car companies.

Toyota picked a 1,100-acre cornfield in rural Gibson County, population
32,000. It was far from union strongholds, had good rail links and was about
180 miles from Toyota's Georgetown, Ky., plant.

From the 1,500 workers Toyota planned to hire more than 10 years ago when it
signed the deal to build the plant, its work force has swollen to more than
5,200.

Initially, Toyota predicted spending $700 million on the factory. But by
2004, its investment had reached $2.5 billion, according to a study by
economists at the University of Evansville and the University of Southern
Indiana. By their tallies, the factory's payroll was $310 million with
another $106 million in benefits for 2004, and the facility had spawned
nearly 13,000 area jobs.

But Toyota's impact goes beyond its payroll.

The largest employer for miles, the company gave away nearly $1.9 million to
area charities and public organizations last year. That's an all-time high
locally for the company, which, as officials explain, prefers to go slow
when throwing around its money and clout.

"We have tried to make sure we are not the 800-pound gorilla," said plant
vice president R.J. Reynolds.

When the factory opened, production workers earned $13 an hour. Today, the
pay is $25 an hour for unskilled workers after two years on the job, and $28
an hour for skilled workers. With sales doing well for the trucks and
minivans produced there, workers lately have been putting in at least an
hour's overtime daily.

Working in the hectic-seeming, cramped confines of the sprawling facility,
which runs around the clock, are former miners, farmers, housewives and
white-collar workers, experienced factory hands and younger workers with
technical degrees. The average worker's age at the plant is 37 years old
compared with 50 years old for General Motors, the nation's largest
automaker.