TOYOTA PLANTS IDLING, BUT WORKERS AREN'T

As the U.S. auto industry sheds workers and Nissan offers buyouts, Toyota is sticking by its proud-and expensive-tradition of no layoffs during hard times.

"This was the first chance we've really had to live out our values," says Latondra Newton, general manager of Toyota's Team Member Development Center in Erlanger, Kentucky. "We're not just keeping people on the payroll because we're nice. At the end of all this, our hope is that we'll end up with a more skilled North American workforce."

On August 8, Toyota halted production of Tundra pickups and Sequoia SUVs at plants in San Antonio and Princeton, Indiana, for three months, idling 4,500 workers.

Keeping 4,500 of its workers on the clock at full pay and benefits for 14 weeks, even at a conservative estimate of $20 an hour, would represent at least $50 million. With a production loss of 30,000 to 40,000 big-ticket pickups and SUVs at an estimated wholesale value of about $25,000 per vehicle, that translates into as much as $1 billion in lost revenue.

It was Newton who first received word of Toyota's decision last month that assembly lines in San Antonio and Princeton would stop making Tundras and Sequoias. Her instructions were clear: All affected workers would remain on the clock at full pay until assembly resumes in November.

No one had developed a contingency plan, so that left Newton and her Kentucky staff with about two weeks of latenight meetings and weekend scrambling to create a plan of action.

Their solution: Move the affected workforce through a nonstop schedule of classes and training exercises aimed at improving their assembly skill levels.

Among the classes they are rotating through: safety drills, productivity improvement exercises, presentations on material handling and workplace hazards, diversity and ethics classes, maintenance education and a stream of online tests to measure and record their skill improvements.

The automaker also is considering ways to shift the Texas and Indiana workers temporarily to Toyota plants in which assembly lines are moving at full speed, such as the Camry assembly plant in Georgetown, Kentucky.

The automaker says it has not decided what employees will do after completing their classes, but they probably will work in community service programs around San Antonio and southern Indiana.

That would put Toyota employees to work cleaning public parks and scrubbing graffiti from buildings around San Antonio, a company spokesman says.

And if executives can resolve logistics and safety issues, they may authorize a weeklong employee assignment to clean up the shoreline of a Texas lake.