Will Toyota bring 1100 more jobs to San Antonio?

[scuba steve]

I hear the pay is pretty good. And the automotive industry can be very hard to get into.

[Bo]

Originally Posted by FCF's Wife

14,000 applications for 850 jobs!! Holy ****! Do these jobs pay anything decent...or is it just that folks need the work, any work?

The average wage at the Toyota plant in Kentucky is $30/hour, according to this article. Probably aren't too many factory jobs in SA that don't require a degree that pay that much.

[FCF's Wife]

Found the following from Motor Trend's forum, can't vouch for accuracy..but seems believable (only unskilled labor mentioned). I remember reading a blurb some time ago about them paying a lot less than what folks were making in the CA plant too.



"Since they began operating U.S. auto factories in the early 1980s, the nonunion Asian and European transplants have kept their wages within a few dollars of those paid by the Detroit 3 to UAW work forces.

But that long-standing practice is under some pressure now. Toyota Motor Corp. and some other transplant automakers are slipping into lower wage rates at their newer plants, widening the gap between their hourly rates and those earned by workers at the Detroit 3.

At the 19-year-old Toyota plant in Georgetown, Ky., workers earn about $25 an hour, plus bonuses, compared with about $27 an hour for UAW workers at the Detroit 3. Last year, Georgetown hourly workers took home $6,300 in bonuses, reflecting the plant's high productivity and Toyota's global profit bonanza.

But Toyota's newly opened Tundra plant in San Antonio started its unskilled hourly workers at about $15.50 last year. After three years, the rates will increase to about $21 an hour.

A confidential internal Toyota document obtained by Automotive News heralds the trend. In it, the president of Toyota Motor Engineering & Manufacturing North America Inc., Seiichi Sudo, states that in the future, Toyota will attempt to "base our hourly wages more closely with the state manufacturing wages where each plant is located and not tie ourselves so closely to the U.S. auto industry."

As if to illustrate the point, Toyota announced in March - soon after the document emerged - that it will build a plant near Tupelo, Miss. The company said wages there would grow to about $20 an hour.

The shift is a reflection of the transplants' growing confidence that their work forces will not be organized by the UAW, says Brett Smith, assistant director of manufacturing at the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich. Most transplant operations have remained nonunion despite 25 years of UAW interest.

"They can get away with reducing wages because the UAW just doesn't have the clout it once did," Smith says.

Nissan pays workers just under $22 an hour at its Canton, Miss., plant, which opened in 2003. Hyundai's pay rate for production workers in Alabama is close to that. In March, Hyundai said it will expand an on-site engine plant there and hire workers at $13.50 an hour."