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toyota
I'm a Veteran of Organized Auto Boycotts. My Advice to Tesla? Dump Musk
During the Great Recession, I organized a Toyota boycott that accidentally paved the way for Musk’s rise. Musk probably won’t tell that story, so I will.
Jul 03, 2025
Elon Musk's alliance with Donald Trump may be over for now, but the Tesla brand has yet to recover from Musk's high profile foray into far-right politics.
Tesla stock has plummeted precipitously ever since Musk’s embrace of Donald Trump last year. It’s been enough to alarm board members, who are now considering replacing Musk as CEO as public “Tesla Takedown” protests have spread across the country.
Ironically, Musk himself was the beneficiary of a similar boycott years ago — a boycott I ran. And since Musk himself is unlikely to relay the story, I will.
In the aftermath of the 2008 market collapse, Toyota announced plans to shutter its Fremont, California factory and move production to Japan, Canada, Mexico, and Mississippi. Not surprisingly, outrage ensued. Soon after, I received a call from the incoming United Auto Workers president Bob King, who asked me to devise a campaign to challenge the Toyota closing.
For Toyota, it was about abandoning California. For Musk, it’s been about dismantling our government and attacking union rights, among other misdeeds.
The strategy we landed on was to reframe this struggle from one borne by workers alone to one that emphasized the broader damage to California’s economy that the closure would cause.
Back then in California, one of every four vehicles sold was a Toyota. As the New York Times’ Bob Herbert wrote in 2010, the U.S. was “the largest market for Toyota vehicles in the world, larger even than Japan.” And the Corolla, built at the Fremont facility, was “the best-selling car of all time.”
But it was that very success that made them vulnerable.
We knew Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays were the prime sales days for most car dealerships. We dispatched our ground troops to cover those three days of the week, in shifts of 8 to 10 people, to 50 dealerships in California and 50 more throughout the United states, holding banners proclaiming, “Toyota Kills California Jobs.”
The company’s sales managers panicked, with several complaining to me personally that their sales were hurting. On April 1, 2010, Toyota shuttered the Fremont factory as they had previously announced, but our boycott continued.
Two weeks later, faced with our ongoing boycott, Toyota president Akio Toyoda, the grandson of the company's founder, called Elon Musk, flew to Los Angeles to meet Musk for dinner, and offered a $50 million cash infusion if Musk would take over the old Fremont plant and hire from the laid off workforce.
Musk had been on the brink of signing a deal to open a Tesla plant in Southern California, but this offer — and the boycott that prompted it — abruptly changed his plans.
Not long after, those Fremont workers were making Teslas instead of Toyotas — and employment at the plant has skyrocketed from 4,700 then to over 20,000 today. Musk went on to become the world’s wealthiest man.
Now, Toyota president Akio Toyoda wasn’t exactly like today’s Musk when it comes to public notoriety. But there are some striking similarities between the two cases.
Both car companies claim to be leaders of environmentally sustainable transportation. Like the Prius before it, a drive through any upscale retail parking lot from Los Angeles to New York City today will similarly show a high proportion of Tesla sedans, bought during less fraught times by environmentally conscious consumers.
And both companies have suffered from a strong sense of betrayal among their most loyal customer base. For Toyota, it was about abandoning California. For Musk, it’s been about dismantling our government and attacking union rights, among other misdeeds.
Today, the cratering of Tesla’s stock value, coinciding with nationwide anti-Musk protests at Tesla dealerships, reinforces two important truisms fundamental to a free market: public opinion of brands still affects stock value, and a CEO's behavior can trigger lasting backlash against their brand.
So as the organizer of the boycott that accidentally helped along Musk’s rise to prominence, what’s my advice for the Tesla board today? Make Musk divest his shares and move on.
It’s likely that nothing else will quell these protests.
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Toyota Exposed for Funding Climate Denialism Designed to Slow EV Transition
"Instead of innovating, Toyota has bankrolled lobbyists and climate-hostile lawmakers to help it defeat EVs," according to Public Citizen.
Jan 14, 2025
Nearly three decades after its introduction, the hybrid Toyota Prius is still associated with environmental action and the scientific consensus that fossil fuel emissions, including those from vehicles, must be reduced to avoid the worst effects of planetary heating.
But a Tuesday report from watchdog group Public Citizen reveals how Toyota has spent recent years becoming the largest funder of U.S. lawmakers who deny the existence of the climate emergency, and a major opponent to the expansion of electric vehicles.
In the report, titled Driving Denial, senior clean vehicles campaigner Adam Zuckerman explains how Toyota has emerged over the last three election cycles as the auto industry's top financial backer of climate deniers in Congress—donating to 207 of their campaigners.
Top climate-denying beneficiaries of Toyota include U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), who received $10,000 from Toyota in during the 2024 cycle—the maximum amount allowed—and Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.), who received $7,000 after he called for the end of EV tax credits and demanded the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) be eliminated.
Between 2020-24, Toyota's political action committee (PAC) has contributed tens of thousands of dollars to right-wing lawmakers including Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), David Schweikert (R-Ariz.) and Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.)—giving a total of "$808,500 to the campaigns of congressional candidates that deny or question the existence of climate change," according to Public Citizen.
Despite Toyota's reputation as a hybrid car innovator, said Zuckerman, "the world's largest automaker has quietly spent the past several years building a powerful U.S. influence operation in an effort to delay the transition to electric vehicles."
"Funding a small army of climate-denying lawmakers, while lobbying aggressively against stronger emissions and fuel economy standards, is a volatile combination intended to roll back policies that protect our communities and planet," he said.
In addition to financing the campaigns of lawmakers who deny that fossil fuel emissions are heating the planet and contributing to more extreme wildfires, hurricanes, and other disasters, Toyota has also directly pushed back against climate regulations.
Three days after President-elect Donald Trump won the November election, Toyota Motor North America executive Jack Hollis falsely called tailpipe emissions standards introduced by California and the EPA "EV mandates" and claimed they will "remove consumer choice."
"Funding a small army of climate-denying lawmakers, while lobbying aggressively against stronger emissions and fuel economy standards, is a volatile combination intended to roll back policies that protect our communities and planet."
Hollis also wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed called on the incoming Trump administration to dismantle Biden-era policies that push automakers to reduce emissions, and in December, Toyota announced it was donating $1 million to Trump's inauguration
"Instead of embracing a green energy future, Toyota has aggressively lobbied to delay and weaken climate action," Public Citizen's report reads.
Toyota's advocacy "has borne results," notes the report. "During the Biden administration, lobbying from Toyota and others forced the EPA to weaken an ambitious EPA plan to limit vehicle emissions. The changes slow the adoption of more stringent vehicle pollution limits, making it easier for EV laggards like Toyota to meet regulations without building electric vehicles."
While billing itself as a global climate leader in recent decades, Toyota was named by InfluenceMap as the third-worst company in the world for anti-climate lobbying, after only fossil fuel giants Chevron and ExxonMobil.
InfluenceMap's 2024 scorecard "highlights Toyota's lobbying efforts against emissions standards in the U.S. and Australia and against EV mandates in Canada and the United Kingdom, as well as Toyota's success in weakening emissions stands in the U.S. and fuel efficiency standards in Australia," reads the Public Citizen report.
While ramping up its lobbying efforts Toyota has invested in carbon-intensive hydrogen-powered vehicles such as the Mirai, a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle (HFCV) introduced in 2014. The Mirai has sold fewer than 25,000 units and has failed to provide consumers with the infrastructure needed for HFCVs, with just 60 hydrogen refueling stations in the U.S. and Canada—leading to a class action lawsuit against the automaker.
The company has pursued "a risky strategy that has left Toyota vulnerable to an influx of competitors who have leapfrogged the auto giant to build the next generation of vehicles," reads the report. "Instead of innovating, Toyota has bankrolled lobbyists and climate-hostile lawmakers to help it defeat EVs."
According to the report, the automaker's abandonment of EV innovation and embrace of climate denial begs the question: "In 20 years, how will the world think of Toyota?"
EVs, said Zuckerman, "are the future of the automotive industry, and if it fails to evolve, Toyota risks becoming the next Kodak or Blockbuster, corporate giants that fought innovation and paid the price for it."
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More Than 10K Workers Have Signed UAW Cards Since Big Three Wins
"These workers are standing up for themselves, for their families, and for their communities, and our union will have their back every step of the way," UAW president Shawn Fain said.
Jan 29, 2024
More than 10,000 U.S. autoworkers have recently signed union cards with the United Autoworkers Union, the UAWannounced on Monday.
The news comes less than 90 days after UAW members ratified historic contracts with the Big Three automakers following their successful "Stand Up" strike.
"Our Stand Up movement has caught fire among America's autoworkers, far beyond the Big Three," UAW president Shawn Fainsaid in a statement. "These workers are standing up for themselves, for their families, and for their communities, and our union will have their back every step of the way."
"Seeing the contracts that they [were] able to get, it was just astounding."
When Fain announced the UAW's tentative deals with Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis, he said one of the union's major goals going forward would be to unionize more nonunion plants.
"When we return to the bargaining table in 2028, it won't just be with the Big Three. It will be the Big Five or Big Six," Fain said at the time.
After ratifying the contacts, the UAW announced a plan to unionize 150,000 employees working for 13 non-union carmakers. Since then, workers at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and a Mercedes plant in Vance, Alabama, have gone public with their union campaigns. At Volkswagen, 2,000 out of 5,500 workers have signed union cards, Local 3 News reported. Washington Post labor reporter Lauren Kaori Gurley said on social media that the Mercedes campaign was also nearing majority support.
The current tally of more than 10,000 cards are divided across all 13 target companies, the UAW said. Gurley predicted that the union would hold elections at Volkswagen and Toyota before the end of the year.
More Perfect Union spoke to workers involved in the organizing drive at the world's largest Toyota plant in Georgetown, Kentucky.
When the plant first opened in 1988, it provided high wages and good benefits, but compensation began to decline following the 2008 recession, despite the fact that Toyota's profits continued to rise. Employee Jeff Allen, who started working there nearly 30 years ago, said the job enabled him to buy a home and a new car early in his career. However, four-year employee Greg Williams said he could not afford to purchase a home and his fiance and two daughters had to rely on Medicaid for their healthcare.
"I totaled a car last week and I can't afford to replace it," Williams said.
Past union drives at Toyota have failed, but workers said they were newly energized by what the UAW won from the Big Three in 2023.
"Seeing the contracts that they [were] able to get, it was just astounding," Allen said. "And I'm like, you know, we could do that. We should do that."
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