Word: plants
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Small, quiet American towns have become popular havens for Japanese manufacturers. This week Toyota Motor is expected to join the crowd of companies building plants in small towns. Toyota will announce plans to spend more than $500 million to construct a plant in Georgetown, Ky., a bucolic community twelve miles north of Lexington in the gently rolling hills of Scott County. When it opens in 1988, the factory will produce 200,000 midsize cars annually and employ between 2,000 and 3,000 workers...
Toyota, Japan's leading auto producer, is the fourth Japanese carmaker to begin building some of its autos in the U.S. Honda paved the way in November 1982, when it opened a plant in Marysville, Ohio. Nissan started manufacturing cars in Smyrna, Tenn., this year, and Mazda is scheduled to open a plant in Flat Rock, Mich., in 1987. By 1989 Japanese companies are expected to be producing some 1 million cars a year in the U.S. The four American carmakers will turn out 7.9 million autos this year...
Among the contenders who failed to snare the Toyota plant were towns in Tennessee, Michigan, Kansas, Missouri and Indiana. Doug Ross, director of Michigan's commerce department and the quarterback of his state's losing bid for the Toyota facility, believes that Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry has been pressuring Japanese automakers to disperse their presence throughout the U.S. This would have strengthened the case for Kentucky, until now a state without any Japanese car plant...
Predictably, the citizens of Georgetown are of two minds about Toyota's move. Where some residents see problems, others see possibilities. Craig Zeysing, 72, and his wife Helen, 60, who own three farms in the area, acknowledge the benefits of new jobs but fear that a large auto plant will change the nature of their little town. On the other hand, the Zeysing's son Herbert, 27, who looks after 65 head of cattle on one of the family's farms, smells opportunity. He has advised his parents to "listen before they say no" to speculators who express interest...
Fifteen hundred protesters gathered at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal last week to mark a grim anniversary: deadly methyl isocyanate gas had leaked from the plant exactly a year earlier, killing at least 1,750 people and injuring thousands more. The protesters burned effigies of Warren M. Anderson, the firm's chairman, and demanded a trial. Others spent the day at Bhopal's hospitals, where some 60,000 victims are still receiving treatment. Said Nassur Khan, 36, who suffers breathing difficulties and severe stomach pains: "I wish I could...