Toyota Needs Foreigner Workers To Drive Its Japanese Expansion

Currently just 9 percent of workers in Japan’s auto workers are foreigners, a number that needs to triple to sustain the market’s annual pace

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by Brad Anderson

3 minutes ago

The company is planning to open a new factory in Japan after 2030.

Generation Alpha will form Toyota’s next-generation of workers.

The number of foreigners working for Toyota in Japan may almost triple.

Toyota plans to increase production in Japan, but to do so, it will have to rely on a growing number of foreign workers. If it doesn’t, production could slip by up to 25 percent, signaling a seismic shift in the country’s automotive labor force that has historically had surprisingly few foreign nationals.

The world’s largest car manufacturer has announced plans to establish a new factory in Aichi prefecture in the 2030s. No specific date has been given, but this will be its first new factory in Japan since 2012. The facility will be located just 3 miles away from a prominent housing complex that’s home to 6,200 people, of which 60 percent are foreigners.

Read: Toyota’s New GR Factory Might Be The Coolest Place To Build Cars

Currently, there are around 1 million people in Japan’s auto industry workforce, and about 9 percent of them are foreigners. However, to maintain domestic production at the expected rate of around 8 million vehicles in 2040, this percentage will need to rise to roughly 27 percent. In 2008, just 4 percent of workers in Japan’s automotive sector were foreign nationals.

The Future Is With Today’s Youth

Key to Toyota’s future is Generation Alpha, those born after 2010. According to Professor Atsushi Kogoma from the School of Management at Sanno University in Tokyo, this generation is more willing to co-exist with foreigners in the workplace than other generations. They will be Toyota’s next generation of workers and help drive its ambitions.

As noted by Nikkei Asia, Toyota can’t afford to take its foot off the gas, even if this means hiring more foreigners. For every 10 percent drop in the nation’s auto production, Japan’s GDP falls by almost 1 percent. According to Toyota chairman Akio Toyoda, “We will preserve domestic production no matter what it takes.”

At the start of April, Toyota added 2,317 new employees to its workforce in Japan, hosting a special ceremony for them that included key company executives, the Toyota GR GT3 race car, and the sleek Century Coupe concept.