bailed out...,
2008-11-17 11:10:23
| Main |
plunge protectionists...,
2008-11-19 17:53:54
fatcat UAW workers up in their fancy pants palaces with their golden lunch pails and stuffed truffles asking the innocent, pure as driven snow taxpayers for handouts:
All of these people are absolute fucking idiots. There's no way a UAW line worker making the average $28 an hour is receiving another $45/hour in benefits. $6.50 for healthcare, maybe a little more if their HR department is as exceptionally incompetent as GM's management, a few bucks more in deferred pension income.
Look at the numbers. It wouldn't be difficult to argue (and you'd have to argue, because GM won't break down the benefits numbers, because they'd rather push a four year old $73/hour number in their perpetual PR campaign against the union) that their actual labor costs are less than Toyota's $48/hour (how else has Toyota kept the unions out?).
For example, you could present the data honestly by including the retirees in the denominator like the $73/hour number includes their healthcare and pension benefits in the numerator. Take Ford as the example, they have twice as many retirees as they do workers. Including them in the denominator would give us $24/hour, half that of Toyota's American subsidiary.
More honestly, we could point out that labor costs are about the same for GM as their competition - union or non-union - but that they have huge obligations to over half a million retirees because the management has routinely opposed socializing those costs like their competitors in Japan and foreign subsidiaries in Europe and Canada, and bought off the 1950s UAW's support for national health insurance with a generous private benefits package instead.
update: Talk about salary creep: "The Truth About Cars" blog has taken the $73/hour fiction and turned it into "$77/hr to do nothing". Very impressive!
