Thread: THE ASTEROIDS ARE STRIKING THE CAR INDUSTRY

THE ASTEROIDS ARE STRIKING THE CAR INDUSTRY

By Dr. Laurie Roth
November 21, 2008
NewsWithViews.com

The asteroids are striking! Cars will be smashed. What will people drive if we aren’t given billions? We will go down in heaping flames and cars will cease to exist. At least that is the view of the desperate shrills of Daimier Chrysler, Ford and GM to congressional leaders.

Lets look a little closer at the body of the dying patient on the table…more light please nurse. First of all lets look at their average wages. Thanks to CNSNews.com we now know that the average worker at DaimierChrysler makes $75.86 and hour. Ford, on average pays their workers $70.51 an hour and GM averages $73.26 an hour. The bottom line is that even with some of these numbers including retirement costs, pensions etc….it still averages about $133,000 per year per worker. Isn’t that special? In a time of national melt down and the car companies allegedly going down the toilet, the average worker desperately struggles with a lowly 100,000 plus salary? Oh horror of horrors. I can hardly process the suffering and pain.

Interestingly, the average worker in the U.S., you know, the forced bail out crowd, makes $28.50 an hour. Isn’t that grand? The $28.50 folks get to bail out the $75.86 folks. For me, the same ‘eyes rolling in the back of my head’ happened when we heard of the AIG executives going to 3-400,000 retreats, padded with every benefit that a visiting King would get. Of course, naturally, we hear that you have to pay big bucks to get ‘the talent.’ They are used to a certain standard of living, on and on. Don’t you just love it when folks in Media, congress and big business remind us of what the big dogs are “usedâ€

Originally Posted by Dr. Laurie Roth

Thanks to CNSNews.com we now know that the average worker at DaimierChrysler makes $75.86 and hour. Ford, on average pays their workers $70.51 an hour and GM averages $73.26 an hour.

Funny that figure doesn't jive with what their contract says. Top pay is $33.09 it takes some real creative math to come up with $70.51 an hour. So after reading the good Doctor's propaganda piece all that's needed is to get rid of the workers. Wake up people it not the wages that drove the industry in to the ground, it's the management stupid. The big 3 didn't want to make cars people wanted because there's more profit in SUVs and other gas hogs. Yeah, let's give billions so they can build more plants in the USSR I mean Russia... That'll help the American economy.

New plant in Russia opens three weeks ago http://www.theautochannel.com/news/2...07/224691.html

Originally Posted by UAW

TABLE A
Examples of Total Hourly Wage Increases
Janitor Assembler Tool & Die
Base Rate - Contract End $22.98 $23.57 $27.70
Skilled trades tool allowance .30
COLA Fold-In 2.00 2.00 2.00
New Agreement Base $24.98 $25.57 $30.00
Beginning COLA float .05 .05 .05
1st-year COLA .32 .32 .32
End 1st-year Base Rate plus COLA $25.35 $25.94 $30.37
2nd-year COLA .40 .40 .40
End 2nd-year Base Rate plus COLA $25.75 $26.34 $30.77
3rd-year 2% base rate Increase .50 .51 .60
3rd-year COLA .44 .44 .44
End 3rd-year Base Rate plus COLA $26.69 $27.29 $31.81
4th-year 3% base rate Increase .76 .78 .92
4th-year COLA .36 .36 .36
End 4th-year Base Rate plus COLA $27.81 $28.43 $33.09
(Projected COLA assumes annual nonmedical inflation averaging 2.2%)

http://www.uaw.org/contracts/03/dch/dch02.cfm

Auto Worker Wages

Articles on the wage costs of automakers routinely reported that autoworkers were paid in the neighborhoods of $75 an hour. This figure was obtained by averaging the cost of contributions for retiree' benefits over the hours worked by the current workforce. As BTP frequently pointed out, this figure seriously misrepresents workers' compensation, since the payments for retirees are independent of the size of the current workforce and are not received by the current workforce.

This point is worth mentioning now because the contracts signed by the UAW with GM and Chrysler removes retiree health benefits from the company's books with Voluntary Employee Benefit Agreements. This means that workers compensation only covers their current pay. If we looked at direct compensation for current workers, this would likely be in the range of $40 an hour. It seems that someone should be reporting that the auto companies have reduced their labor costs from $75 an hour to $40 an hour.

--Dean Baker

Posted by Dean Baker on November 1, 2007 11:21 PM | Permalink

http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/b...o_worker_wages
Note the date 2007.

Send me to the rubber room
From the porch
Dwight Otwell




How could it come to this a company paying employees not to work?
But that is exactly what the American auto industry is doing with many of its auto workers. That is one reason American cars are so expensive.
The mix of big business, unions and circumstances has produced a program that would make the most bureaucratic of governmental bureaucrats giddy with thoughts of paper piles and pork.
The Wall Street Journal recently reported on the Jobs Bank. The program has been in existence with American auto makers for about 20 years and about 15,000 employees get paid, sometimes for years, when they are no longer needed. Other downsizing companies would have laid them off with a few months to a year's worth of severance pay. Some would get nothing from the company but would be eligible for unemployment insurance for awhile.
But not at the American automobile companies. These men and women will earn more than $60,000 a year plus benefits for an unknown length of time. One GM worker has been receiving $64,500 a year (his full salary of $31 an hour) plus health care and other benefit since 2000.
Once in the Jobs Bank, an employee must perform a company approved activity. That could be doing volunteer work or going back to school, which sounds good. Sometimes employees do worthwhile community service or study serious subjects. But often classes taken include subjects such as crossword puzzles, Civil War movies, how to play Trivial Pursuit or how to deal blackjack and poker.
If a person can't find a desirable class or project, he must enter the "rubber room" five days a week from about 6 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. In this room, employees sit and read, watch cartoons or stare at the walls. It has been compared to a six-hour after-school detention class. Inmates, I mean workers, often feel like they are going crazy with nothing to do. That's why they call it the "rubber room".
The Wall Street Journal reported that the Jobs Bank at U.S. auto companies will cost around $1.4 billion to $2 billion this year. GM itself helped originate the Jobs bank in 1984 and agreed to expand it in 1990. There is no limit, unlike unemployment insurance, on how long a worker can stay in the Jobs Bank.
Why would workers want to find another job? Where else can they make more than most Americans earn by doing almost nothing?
The Jobs Bank also encourages auto makers to build more vehicles than consumers want because they believe it is better to build cars with little or no profit margin than to pay people not to work.
When stupidity and lack of common sense become entrenched in big American business, it is no wonder that we are losing ground to foreign countries.

Something still does not look right. If the total cost for past and present workers adds up to $75 ph, and the current worker who is still working on the floor is responsible for $40 ph of that $75, then that means you have people that are costing $35 per hour! even though they are retired? Those that are not working are making $5 less per hour than the current worker that is working? Now that is one heck of a benefits package! That is assuming that there are just as many retired as there are currently working, which seems top heavy to me.

There is more to this than meets the eye. JMHO

And where has all of the money from military contracts gone?

This too big to fail rhetoric combined with fear tactics seems like a perfect recipe to fleece the coffers.

Just imagine if you were operating a pig farm with these two types of animals. One being the animal of fear, the wild russian boar comes to mind. This is a animal to fear. The others are so fat and big that they cannot even walk to the feed trough, you would have to bottle feed them. Now dose'nt that sound like a profitable operation?

Not sure if my analogy was intended for the big 3, or congress?

It's not just retired workers, it's wokers that have no work to do. If they don't need the auto body paint sprayers for two years, they still get paid to stay home. And some people are on permenent sick leave.
Blame this on the unions. They don't fire you or lay you off they keep you on and pay you to stay home. That's no way to run a business.

Dixie

Originally Posted by Dixie

It's not just retired workers, it's wokers that have no work to do. If they don't need the auto body paint sprayers for two years, they still get paid to stay home. And some people are on permenent sick leave.
Blame this on the unions. They don't fire you or lay you off they keep you on and pay you to stay home. That's no way to run a business.

Dixie

Only in the Soviet States of America would this fly. Socialism at it's finest. Utopia is wonderful, but mankind is not. This is why it does not work, and this is one of the reasons unions of all kinds have fallen out of my favor. Along with when I was working at a steel mill, and after only working for 5 or 6 months, the union told us to go on strike. While we were getting paid 3.50 an hour to picket, the union bosses were riding in Cadillac, and Lincoln stretch limos, wearing Botany 500 suits, and Italian shoes, and wearing Rolex gold watches, and gold bejewelled rings. At 18 years old, I saw the inequity and abuse by these dinosaurs. So I left the picket line and quit. I could not in good conscience continue to prop up such organizations of corruption and theivery.

And Henry Ford was villified for his staunch anti-union ideologies. He knew it way back when. Unions take everything that is sound economics, and thows it out the window.