Posted on 03/03/2010 7:03:04 PM PST by NormsRevenge
FREMONT (CBS 5 / BCN) ― California Treasurer Bill Lockyer said Wednesday that Toyota's plan to close the New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. plant in Fremont on April 1 would cost taxpayers an estimated $2.3 billion and cripple the state's economy.
Lockyer said a report by a blue ribbon commission chaired by University of California at Berkeley professor Harley Shaiken "completely takes apart Toyota's excuses for closing the plant" and shows that the plant is financially viable and is needed to help Toyota meet its U.S. sales targets.
Shaiken said closing the plant "would amount to abandonment of one of Toyota's core values: job security for its workers," and it would be the first major plant shutdown in the automaker's 73-year history.
He said, "For Toyota, the risk is how other employees react and how customers react to their not keeping their word."
NUMMI was a 25-year-old joint venture between General Motors and Toyota, but GM announced in June that it would withdraw from the partnership and Toyota announced in August that it wouldn't order any more vehicles from the plant after the end of March.
The company employs about 4,700 people and the commission's report estimates that the closure could affect another 25,000 people who work at suppliers around the state that do business with NUMMI.
Shaiken said Toyota's announcement last August about closing the plant was based on "very short-term and narrow goals" and was made in the midst in one of the worst years ever for auto sales.
He said he's hopeful that Toyota will now reconsider that decision ..
But Jeff McAndrews, a spokesman for Toyota Motor North America, Inc., said, "The argument that the plant is economically feasible is incorrect" and the decision to close it is final.
(Excerpt) Read more at cbs5.com ...
“...a blue ribbon commission chaired by University of California at Berkeley professor Harley Shaiken “completely takes apart Toyota’s excuses for closing the plant...”
That pretty much sums up right there why Toyota wants nothing to do with NUMMI - too much UAW, too much Berkeley, too much politics, too much California.
I am sure Toyota can’t WAIT to pour more money into a nation ruled by Obama’s Regime and the Chicago Machine.
Those idiotic auto executives. What on Earth makes them think they know how to run a car company better than a lawyer and a Berkeley professor?
Note, by the way, that Bill Lockyer is notionally a Republican. Thus is the sad state to which the California GOP has sunk.
Death to the UAW and card check!
Yeah, a third rate pack of communist hacks who never held a real job make better business decisions than a private corporation.
If Toyota is passing up such a wonderful bargain, why doesn’t the esteemed Dr. Shaiken rustle up an alternative buyer?
yeah, government knows best. Maybe these asshats should understand that theses people do this to make money. These arrogant SOB’s should stay the hell out of private Co. business. Maybe by lowering there taxes and stop micro managing them would help.
So there you go, you socialist union freaks.
I'm just thinking out loud here...but might the fact that the local leeches in government were sucking $2,300,000,000 out of the company have something to do with it going out of business?
If the plant is such a money maker, why did GM abandoned it?
Looks like the liberal policy chickens are coming home to roost.
This ought to suit Zero's agenda just fine - the whole point over the last few months has been to drive Government Motor's main competition out of business or at least out of the market. GM didn't back out of this 25 year partnership for kicks. This ought to result in 25,000 fewer brain-dead liberal voters.
I piss on these stupid losers crying about mean old Toyota. It's high time to wash out the California gene pool.
At bottom, this decision was driven by the UAW.
As yet, Toyota has had no dealings with American unions. All of their other U.S. plants are non-union.
But NUMMI is a union shop -- because it was originally a GM plant. When GM couldn't run it profitably, they contracted with Toyota to operate the plant. The union remained contracted to GM.
If Toyota took over ownership of the plant, they'd get the union along with the bricks and mortar.
They don't want it.
Let the UAW buy the plant.
LOL!! Even they aren’t that stupid. Well, maybe.
This is a distortion of language. It will not "cost the taxpayers" anything in the sense of the state paying out money. The state will be unable to extract $2.3B from the company and workers.
It is kind of funny that NOT getting $2.3B from these taxpayers is said to COST the taxpayers $2.3B...
The fact that Toyota is displaying the good business sense to bail out of a state run by liberal asshats makes me more, not less, likely to consider Toyota when next carshopping.
Only in your fantasies. He's a rabidly anti-gun Democrat.
After founding the Cal Berkeley Young Democrats, Lockyer began his political career as a School Board member of the San Leandro Unified School District, as chair of the Alameda County Democratic Central Committee, and California coordinator of Senator George McGovern's 1972 campaign for the Presidency.
That's the great thing about the capitalism and the free market, now Lockyer or Professor Shaiken are free to buy the "financially viable" plant and make themselves wealthy.
This is right out of Atlas Shrugged
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