Toyota Motor Corp and Honda Motor Co plan to add as many as 5,000 temporary workers in Japan for the first time in more than a year, signaling the industry’s recovery from the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.
Toyota will add between 3,000 and 4,000 temporary workers in Japan from the middle of next month as it starts to increase production in October, spokeswoman Shiori Hashimoto said yesterday by telephone. Honda will hire 1,000 temporary employees, spokeswoman Tomoko Uchida said.
Toyota’s domestic plants are running at 90 percent of planned levels this month, up from 50 percent in April and last month, because of a shortage of parts from suppliers damaged by the March disasters. The world’s biggest carmaker, which had 69,000 full-time workers at the end of March, expects factories to reach 100 percent of planned production levels by next month.
“Hiring temporary workers shows that the problem with parts supply is being resolved and that the industry is on a solid recovery path,” said Takeshi Miyao, an analyst at consulting company Carnorama in Tokyo. “There are a lot of back orders and without these additional workers, they won’t be able to catch up fast enough.”
Toyota last hired temporary workers in December 2009, while Honda, Japan’s third-largest automaker, did so in April last year.
Nissan Motor Co, the nation’s second-biggest carmaker, has already begun hiring as many as 200 temporary workers to help boost production, spokesman Mitsuru Yonekawa said yesterday.
Toyota employed 960 temporary workers as of the end of March. The new hires will have fixed-term contracts for a period still being determined, said Dion Corbett, a company spokesman. Honda’s temporary workers may have their three-month contracts renewed for two years, Uchida said.
Japanese carmakers’ domestic production fell 60 percent in April as Toyota’s output in the country plunged 78 percent.
“Japanese carmakers’ production in the second half of this fiscal year will exceed the level of last year’s second half,” said Satoru Takada, an analyst at TIW Inc in Tokyo. “This will eventually create a positive flow for the overall economy.”
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