All the job losses will be forced redundancies, covering blue and white collar workers involved across the company’s manufacturing activities.

More than 3300 workers gathered at the Altona plant in a highly orchestrated company-wide briefing, to hear Toyota Australia president Max Yasuda announce the job cuts.

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Camry production at Toyota’s Altona assembly line.
It is the latest blow to the car industry, which is increasingly reliant on government handouts for survival, caught with outmoded classes of cars as consumers increasingly opt for small cars and SUVs ahead of locally build big sedans.

Earlier today, the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union was still in the dark over job-loss plans.

Toyota had reneged on its commitment in the enterprise bargaining agreement signed last month to consult with the union ahead of any job cuts, said Ian Jones, the federal secretary of the union’s vehicle building division.

“It’s extraordinary that there procedures in the agreement laid out for how you handle these things, and Toyota is simply not following any of them,” Mr Jones said.

He said voluntary redundancy terms included four weeks pay in lieu of notice and three weeks pay for every year of service. If insufficient workers elected to take the packages, and the company tried to force redundancies, then the union would push for a much more generous package for workers forced to quit, Mr Jones said.

“It will be far more substantial if we have to renegotiate,” he said.Last year, Toyota Australia produced about 94,000 cars, exporting about 60,000 of them mainly to the Middle East and 13 other smaller overseas markets.

But those figures are almost 40 per cent shy of the company’s peak output of almost 149,000 cars in 2007.

The Altona assembly line is the heart of Toyota’s operations, employing, until the cuts, 3350 people in assembly, painting, parts and logistics.

The company employs 4700 overall, including in their corporate head office in Port Melbourne, warehousing, sales and marketing in Sydney and regional offices in all states that liaise between the company and its 211 dealers nationwide.

Despite the cuts, Toyota spokesman Glenn Campbell said the company was in for a busy year, with the introduction of the latest-generation petrol-electric Hybrid Camry in late February or March, and a refreshed Aurion six-cylinder in April and a new engine plant to produce four cylinder engines due to be completed by year’s end.

The parent company’s decision to commit to a new $300 million engine plant designed to produce 100,000 engines a year was a “very positive sign for manufacturing, as the cycle for engine investment is every 10 years”.

Until the new factory is operational, engines would continue to be crated from Japan.

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