Toyota Motor Manufacturing Czech Republic in Kolín resumed production yesterday after a shutdown. Employees returned to the full three-shift system. The shutdown lasted with a week-long break from August 15, before that the employees were on plant-wide leave. The reason was the lack of chips for on-board electronics, which is bothering the entire automotive industry, spokesman Tomáš Paroubek told ČTK.
The company partially resumed production in the week of September 6, produced several hundred cars, and normally produces about a thousand of them a day. The next week, however, the lines stopped completely again, now the employees will gradually return to full production. During the outage, Toyota workers received 80 percent of their average salary.
On the contrary, Škoda Auto from Mladá Boleslav is preparing for a shutdown due to a lack of chips, it is preparing it for the whole next week, when it will use one day of the national holiday. Employees of all three Škoda plants will stay at home for 85 percent of the average wage, which roughly corresponds to daily earnings.
According to the Škoda unions, there are shutdowns in Volkswagen Group factories around the world. “Some high-margin companies, such as Porsche and Audi, are partially preferred. Planned outages are especially important for supplier planning and logistics flows,” said Jaroslav Povšík, Chairman of the Škoda Auto Works Council.
Toyota Motor Manufacturing Czech Republic employs about 2,500 people in Cologne, last year on April 1 it started recruiting new employees for the production of the Yaris model, it wants to hire up to 1,000 people. It represents one of the largest exporters in the Czech Republic and at the same time the largest employer in the Kolín region. According to the Association of the Automotive Industry, the production of cars at the Kolín car manufacturer fell by 26.4 percent to 147,865 cars last year.