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NEWS
Toyota 'drive centres' to redirect staff
Staff affected by migration to full-line importing will be offered assistance, retraining and redeploymentToyota plans to establish a new 'drive centre' to assist its Sydney staff facing redundancy or relocation to Melbourne.
The company – embarked on a three-year plan leading up to the closure of its Altona production plant in Victoria – has already opened drive centres in Melbourne to counsel and retrain staff located in the southern capital.
During the announcement earlier this week that 2014 was Toyota's 12th consecutive year of sales leadership in the local market, Tony Cramb (pictured), the company's Executive Director for Sales and Marketing, outlined further details of the downsizing strategy – and the impact it will have on staff.
"We've already introduced in Melbourne two [of] what we call 'drive centres'. The drive centres are locations that you can go and visit, and in that drive centre you can look at all the different roles that you could do, as you move forward, and start to think about the training that you could undertake.
"It's a massive investment by Toyota... six counsellors – one that's out at the plant. Individuals – all of the 3500 people – can come through and talk about their own particular circumstances, start their own training program, think about what career they're going to take [in] future...
"The same thing will happen in Sydney. The drive centre will be established in early February, and once again we'll be working one by one with the 550 families that are impacted... to make sure that each of those people has a clear path, if they're going to come to Melbourne, if they're going to make the transition – or if not, how it is that we can help them prepare their life, post-Toyota, given that there's three years..."
According to Cramb, Toyota will eventually vacate the Caringbah site.
"I don't think the company's specifically decided what to do with the property at this point in time, but it is planned that we will move away from that site. So what happens to it is yet to be decided," he stated.
The Altona site will be retained as a training hub, with some staff currently serving at the company's Port Melbourne HQ relocated there. It was hinted that the Altona facility will be a base for field operations by visiting Japanese engineering teams in Australia.
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Written byKen Gratton
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