Toyota shuts down all but one assembly line!
TOYOTA CITY, Japan - February 5, 2009 - On what was to be a historic day halting all of Toyota's Japanese assembly lines, the automaker announced late Thursday that it kept one line running.
The late news sent copy editors and reporters to their laptops erasing headlines like "historic shutdown," but it did little to quell the pain for the tens of thousands of workers idled across Japan as nearly every Toyota line stopped producing autos and auto-related equipment.
Nowhere was the silence more deafening than in Toyota City, home and birthplace to Toyota Motor Corp. Factories were shuttered and workers idled in an attempt to bring production in line with falling global demand.
The day was particularly ominous for assembly line worker Takayuki Yoshikawa, who has already been told he's out of a job and back home in May. Yoshikawa lives in a Toyota-owned dormitory.
"I don't know what to do," said Yoshikawa. "I could go back to my hometown, but there are no jobs there, either."
Toyota, now the world's largest automaker, plans 10 more days like this, spread out over the next two months. Toyota's incoming president, Akio Toyoda, called the current economy "unprecedented, the likes of which haven't been seen in 100 years."
