Accompanying the local elected officials and business leaders invited to celebrate Toyota Texas’ 20th anniversary Wednesday were more than a dozen employees, each wearing a red polo shirt commemorating the milestone.
Mac Hook, a quality engineer who started at Toyota 15 years ago after earning a mechanical engineering degree from Texas A&M University, was happy to talk about why he believes Toyota is a “quality place to work.”
He described “a loyalty between the company and the workforce,” which he believes is “kind of rare these days,” and a big reason he has stayed with the company, which last year produced 126,189 Tundra trucks and hybrid Sequoia SUVs.
Toyota officials marked the occasion by announcing $100,000 in donations. Half will go to the Institute for School and Community Partnerships at Texas A&M University-San Antonio to boost science, technology, engineering and math educational opportunities. The other half will go to the 100 Club of San Antonio, which supports law enforcement and firefighters.
Toyota’s commitment to the community “goes beyond creating quality jobs,” said Kevin Voelkel, group vice president of North American truck manufacturing and president of Toyota Texas.
“When we broke ground 20 years ago, we promised to be a best-in-town company, and I think we have lived up to that promise,” he said. “We have grown our team from 1,200 to more than 3,800 today, and have continued to invest in this facility,” to the tune of $4.2 billion, according to company figures.
Priscilla Juarez, who began working for Toyota supplier Vutex as a part sorter in 2011, moved to Toyota in 2016. In both cases, she received on-the-job training. At Toyota, that began with a system fundamentals course before being trained for her specific role on the assembly line.
“Today, I build trucks,” she said. “I love what I do. I love my line, my coworkers. It’s like family. We care so much for each other.”
Juarez said she has a chronic health condition, and the company has been “very supportive” of her needs. She said her son, who just turned 18, is interested in working for Toyota himself.
Now vice president of manufacturing, Susann Kazunas has been with Toyota for 25 years. She started her career with the automaker in Kentucky as a summer intern, then was hired as a tooling engineer after graduating from the University of Kentucky.
Kazunas said she spent about three months on the factory floor getting “hands-on familiar” with the tools before moving into her engineering role.
Today, part of Kazunas’ role is to make sure the company’s manufacturing talent pipeline is full. She praised Bexar County’s economic development department as a critical workforce development partner, as well as the local chapters of TX FAME.
That program, which expanded recently to help meet the growing local demand for manufacturing employees, pairs a sponsor company with a student who gets paid on-the-job training three days a week and spends two days a week in the classroom, earning a two-year advanced manufacturing technician associate degree. Most are then hired full time by their sponsoring company.
Kazunas said the key to getting more people interested in manufacturing jobs is to show people what modern manufacturing looks like. Toyota brings a number of local students through on field trips to its Southside plant. In addition to the facility’s Experience Center, which includes a small museum and interactive equipment — “Where you can, you know, put a seat into a truck, that kind of stuff,” Kazunas said — they also get to tour part of the factory.
“It’s very eye-opening,” she said. “They get out there on the tram tour, and it’s bright and clean, and they see robots, and automatic guided vehicles, and it’s really cool.”
Kazunas said she finally convinced her 17-year-old daughter to take a tour “and she left out of here after the tour and said, ‘I might want to be an AMT.’ And so now she’s applying to the FAME program.”
An onsite visit is how Mary Flores ended up working on a line that makes “the outside shell of the truck. We produce it, then send it out to assembly.”
She said she had a friend in the paint department who convinced her to come to an open house. She, too, trained on the job.
Flores said the job changed her life in a couple ways. It provides for her family, and she said it changed her mindset.
“I’m a little bit old-fashioned and set in my ways, and I was always a little bit afraid of computers,” she said. “And now I actually work with computers pretty often. It’s challenging. And I love that about Toyota.
