INDIANAPOLIS (AP) -- United Auto Workers officials aren't saying yet whether Indiana's three major Japanese auto factories will be a front line in its new campaign to unionize employees at plants owned by foreign-based car companies.
More than 8,000 people work at Indiana's Subaru, Toyota and Honda factories that aren't unionized and it is one of the few traditional union states with a major presence of foreign automakers.
UAW President Bob King said last week that the union would decide in three months which foreign company it would target and that the organizing plans were critical to the union's outlook.
Maurice Davison, the UAW's top official in Indiana and Kentucky, wouldn't say what's in store for the factories in Indiana, where the closing of several factories have cut UAW active membership from nearly 69,000 in 2000 to about 30,000 late last year.
Davison told the Indianapolis Business Journal that the union has helped revitalize the American automakers.
"We see what Ford, GM and Chrysler are doing. It's worked quite well. It's really turned around," Davison said.
Foreign carmakers have avoided unions in the United States by keeping wages close to those of union workers and avoiding layoffs of its full-time workers.
Toyota didn't lay off any of the 4,200 workers at its plant near Princeton in southwestern Indiana or from its assembly line at the 3,300-worker Subaru plant in Lafayette when it shut down production on some models to fix sticking gas pedals.
Toyota also kept all its Princeton workers when it shut down an entire line for three months in 2009 after the company consolidated assembly of the Tundra pickup truck to Texas.
"There was some shared sacrifice at all levels," Toyota spokesman Mike Goss said. The company cut executive pay and halted a team-member bonus program, among other measures to deal with the downturn.
"Many of those things have been re-instituted now that things have turned around," Goss said.
Similarly, Subaru Executive Vice President Tom Easterday said that Subaru is the only automaker in the United States that has given raises for 20 consecutive years and it has maintained premium-free health coverage.
UAW officials think that if the foreign companies have any weaknesses, it's on issues of safety or fair treatment.
"Typically when we do get called, it isn't about wages," Davison said.
Labor observers said it wasn't clear where the UAW might find its first opening.
"It's absolutely true that the best way to encourage union organizing is to do something really stupid" to anger workers, said Kenneth Dau-Schmidt, a professor of labor and employment law at Indiana University.
At the Japanese-owned plants, he said, "Management has done a good job of not creating upset workers."
Honda, which opened its plant in Greensburg in 2008, kept out potential employees from traditional union-friendly Anderson and Muncie by hiring only people who lived nearby counties.
Some of the union's traditional methods would be impossible at Toyota in Princeton, said Frank Hudek, who helped organize his own plant, Pittsburgh Glass in Evansville.
Because the Toyota buildings sit so far from a public street, Hudek said, it would be difficult to hand out fliers. And workers inside the plant couldn't wear T-shirts or buttons to show their support because they have to wear uniforms.
"There's probably issues that would interest them in the union," Hudek said of Toyota's Princeton workers. "It's hard to get in there."
