UAW targets Toyota - NTSB forces recalls. Coincidence?

The recent spate of recalls of Toyota cars is curious. Toyota has about 19% of all cars on the road in America, but comprises only ~6% of the complaints in the NTSB database. The following 2007 editorial sheds some light on this curious situation:

In the face of this diminution of their bargaining power, the UAW has tried to open a fourth front: Toyota. This morning, members of [a UAW invention called] the Kentucky Workers' Rights Board submitted a list of "recommendations" for improving working conditions at ToMoCo's KY factory. Needless to say, company executives refused to meet with them. Toyota spokesman Rick Hesterberg stated, "If they have recommendations or proposals for us, they can leave them here for us to review."

It's notable that these recommendations were accompanied by a press release and that the KWRB stated that they would release another one ofter the proposed meeting - thereby insuring that Toyota would reject their proposed meeting. Except for the NUMMI plant in CA which it formerly shared with GM, none of the Toyota plants in the US are unionized.

To say that President Obama is a friend of the unions is like saying Taylor Swift likes Romeo and Juliet. The unions were major contributors in both money and manpower to Obama's campaign; union chiefs have been the most frequent visitors to the Obama White House; Obama even excepted the unions' overly generous medical insurance plans from his "cadillac" medical insurance plan tax.

So now that we have the union-boss-in-chief in power, his administration has attacked the biggest obstacle to the auto unions in the biggest non-union auto company in the world. And he has attacked them in their area of greatest popularity - their reliability - using the only organization able to do so: the NTSB. But the data that is being used to do so is questionable at best. As mentioned above, Toyota has about 19% of all cars on the road in America, but comprises only ~6% of the complaints in the NTSB database.

The original complaints about enhanced acceleration were traced to FLOOR MATS! Are you kidding me? Are these actually real complaints? This reminds me of the "spontaneous acceleration of Audi's back in the 80's that was traced to elderly ladies who confusedly pressed the gas instead of the brake pedal! So now they have a world-wide recall because there have been what? - less than a dozen cases of accelerators sticking open. How many Ford Pintos would that have been worth?

And now they want to recall Prius's (the poster child for Obama's "green" revolution) because the brakes sometimes fail - but they have a hard time reproducing it. [I guess Obama is more concerned with supporting his political friends than his political agenda - or maybe unionism better supports his socialist agenda than private companies' successes (even "green" ones).]