Biography | 豊田喜一郎 Kiichiro Toyoda — He Resigned Five Days Before the Dispute He Resigned Over Was Settled

The founder of Toyota left the company he built, and the sequence is usually told backwards.

The Dodge Line had drained credit out of Japanese industry through 1949. Dealers were refusing allocated vehicles, steel prices had been decontrolled while vehicle prices had not, and the company was forecasting losses of around twenty-two million yen a month.

A labour dispute began on 11 April 1950 over the reconstruction plan and the job cuts inside it.

On 25 May, Kiichiro told a meeting of the Toyota National Dealers' Advisory Council that he accepted responsibility and would resign. Two days later the union tabled his resignation, and that of the executive vice president and a managing director, at the twenty-first round of collective bargaining.

He resigned on 5 June, alongside executive vice president Kazuo Kumabe and managing director Kohachiro Nishimura.

The dispute was not settled until the 10th. The twenty-ninth round ran through the night of 8 June; the union accepted the reconstruction plan early on the 9th, and the memorandum was signed the following day.

The numbers deserve stating correctly, because the figure that circulates is the target rather than the outcome. Voluntary retirement had been aimed at 1,600 people, and by 6 June roughly 1,700 had come forward.

The final count was 2,146 jobs, including 378 at the Shibaura and Kamata plants in Tokyo, which closed. A workforce of 5,994 remained.

The memorandum also brought back about 160 of those who had left, cut wages by ten per cent from 16 June, and gave priority in future hiring to the people leaving then.

At an extraordinary shareholders' meeting on 18 July the whole board resigned together, and Taizo Ishida of Toyoda Automatic Loom Works took the presidency.

Kiichiro was to return to it. He died of a cerebral haemorrhage on 27 March 1952, at fifty-seven, before he could.

The pin is the Honsha plant, formerly Koromo, where the reconstruction was fought over. It is a working factory and closed to visitors.

Photo: unknown photographer, public domain (published before 1952), via Wikimedia Commons.