5,000 temporary staff are laid off.
Toyota’s North American assembly lines should restart on May 4th.
Honda, Nissan, BMW, and others are also being forced to lay off employees.
Toyota, very much like Honda, Nissan, BMW, and other carmakers are seeing no alternatives but to lay off thousands of employees amid the coronavirus pandemic. Most factories in North America were idled over three weeks ago and with sales plummeting, manufacturers are running out of reserves. This is why Toyota’s laid off about 5,000 temporary staff.
While these employees have been put aside, full-time employees continue to be paid however Toyota is now asking them to use two vacation days of not be paid at all for these two days, during the extended shutdown. Initially, Toyota was to restart production on March 25th but now, nothing goes back online before May the 4th.
Honda, BMW, and Nissan are faced with the same issue however they will stop paying their employees and suggested that they file for state unemployment benefits. New car sales dropped dramatically in the US and Canada in March (and the full 1st quarter) and April is shaping up to be catastrophic, to say the least. The hope is that May will be the beginning of a mild upswing however it could take months before the industry returns to “normal.”
