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Thread: Do auto workers really earn $73 an hour?

  1. #13

    Default Re: Do auto workers really earn $73 an hour?

    These CEO's are liars! You can't trust them, congress, or wall street. Don't fall for the mis-information. Thanks to the ones who found the real truth. I never believed in the $73 number.
    100 G
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  3. #14

    Default Re: Do auto workers really earn $73 an hour?

    Congress (mostly Repubs) were right to grill the Big 3 about getting lean and mean. They need to quickly cut product lines, plants and even more salary and possibly retirement benefits. Fortunately our govt hasn't figured out how to replace Fed ees wholesale with foreign workers, like car companies can. But consider all the private contractors in Iraq.

    Congress completely folded on the $700 bil bailout. Now one of the most inept administrations in history is trying to repeat that blunder with a Kar czar. Well, maybe if we request the foreign aid of a Karzakstan or Pashtun war lord and his tribal executives to enforce radical change, it might succeed. Mabe they could first rewrite the rules for the 700 bil too.

    The retail price was not mentioned but look what's coming down the road from China. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programme...nt/7779261.stm

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  5. #15

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    Default Re: Do auto workers really earn $73 an hour?

    There is a good explanation of what really happened this week.

    It's not about lowering costs of labor. Labor really only accounts for about $800 to $1,000 of the price of a new car, and cutting a few dollars off that is going to make the difference between success and failure of the car companies. It's a lot more than that. Republicans are the party intent on lowering the wages and benefits of the American worker, plain and simple; and most importantly, Republicans want to break American organized labor. They see organized labor as a roadblock to their power- and that is what republicans are all about- gaining and holding power.

    This is simply all about breaking organized labor. This explains it:


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  7. #16

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    Default Re: Do auto workers really earn $73 an hour?

    Here is UAW's press conference from Friday:

    Part 1



    Part 2



    Part 3


    Part 4


    Part 5




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  9. #17

    Default Re: Do auto workers really earn $73 an hour?

    Autoworker wage and benefit differences

    By The Associated Press – 2 days ago

    Hourly wages for United Auto Workers laborers at General Motors Corp. factories actually are almost equal to those paid by Toyota Motor Corp. at its older U.S. factories, according to the companies. GM says the average UAW laborer makes $29.78 per hour, while Toyota says it pays about $30 per hour.
    The difference is in benefits, with the unionized factories having far higher costs.

    GM says its total hourly labor costs are now $69 including wages, pensions and health care for active workers, plus the pension and health care costs of more than 432,000 retirees and spouses. Toyota says its total costs are around $48. The Japanese automaker has far fewer retirees and its pension and health care benefits are not as rich as those paid to UAW workers.

    The UAW has not been able to organize workers at a Toyota plant in this country; it does represent workers at one joint GM-Toyota plant in Fremont, Calif.

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  11. #18

    Default Re: Do auto workers really earn $73 an hour?

    Quote Originally Posted by Greg View Post
    Autoworker wage and benefit differences

    By The Associated Press – 2 days ago

    Hourly wages for United Auto Workers laborers at General Motors Corp. factories actually are almost equal to those paid by Toyota Motor Corp. at its older U.S. factories, according to the companies. GM says the average UAW laborer makes $29.78 per hour, while Toyota says it pays about $30 per hour.
    The difference is in benefits, with the unionized factories having far higher costs.

    GM says its total hourly labor costs are now $69 including wages, pensions and health care for active workers, plus the pension and health care costs of more than 432,000 retirees and spouses. Toyota says its total costs are around $48. The Japanese automaker has far fewer retirees and its pension and health care benefits are not as rich as those paid to UAW workers.

    The UAW has not been able to organize workers at a Toyota plant in this country; it does represent workers at one joint GM-Toyota plant in Fremont, Calif.
    If Toyota pays their workers $30 and GM pays its union workers $29, why are the GM worker paying dues to the union-bosses? huh?


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  13. #19

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    Default Re: Do auto workers really earn $73 an hour?

    Quote Originally Posted by jon View Post
    Congress (mostly Repubs) were right to grill the Big 3 about getting lean and mean. They need to quickly cut product lines, plants and even more salary and possibly retirement benefits.
    They HAVE been getting lean and mean, cutting product lines, plants, and workers. Lots of workers have been cut over the last few years. This year, for example, GM employs 73,000 UAW workers. That's down from 102,000 in 2005, and 123,000 in 2000.

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  15. #20

    Default Re: Do auto workers really earn $73 an hour?


    What makes a car American?

    By Ashley Fantz
    CNN

    (CNN) -- With the top U.S. automakers in economic survival mode, "Buy American" is a frequent cry among those trying to save jobs at home.
    But buying a car to benefit the U.S. economy has become an ambiguous, complicated challenge.

    "How you define an American car is one of the great conundrums of this world," said Dutch Mandel, the editor and associate publisher of AutoWeek.
    Fewer than half of the parts on some Big Three vehicles are made in the U.S.

    Looking at a Ford Fusion? It is assembled in Mexico. The Chrysler 300C is assembled in Canada, but its transmission is from Indiana; the brand's V-8 engine is made in Mexico. Engines in the Chevrolet Equinox sport utility vehicle are from China.

    On the other hand, Toyota's Camry is comprised 80 percent of parts made in the United States, and 56 percent of Toyota's vehicles sold in the U.S. also are made here, according to Toyota spokeswoman Sona Iliffe-Moon. The Toyota Sienna and Tundra also have 80 percent of their parts manufactured in the U.S.

    "When you have manufacturers from around the world building cars in the U.S. with 85 percent domestic content -- engine, transmission, assembly -- is that an American car?" Mandel asked. Or, he asks, is it considered foreign because the profits go back to a foreign country?

    "It's truly a global industry," said Thomas Klier, a Chicago, Illinois, economist who co-authored "Who Really Made Your Car?" an encyclopedic analysis of the auto industry melting pot.

    "When you think of buying American, you should focus on three points -- its engine, transmission and where it was assembled," Klier said.
    To get that information, read a vehicle's window sticker. U.S. automakers are legally required to detail the origin of a car's parts and its final assembly point.

    "Unfortunately, there are few people who know about the sticker or even bother to look at it," said Bernard Swiecki, a senior project manager at the nonprofit Center for Automotive Research in Michigan, which follows trends in the industry.

    The sticker's details were news to Douglas Sullivan, 43, a truck driver from Snellville, Georgia. Though he prefers foreign brands, believing them to be of higher quality, he said he used to favor U.S. brands because he wanted to support American workers.

    "I wanted to keep the jobs right here," Sullivan said.

    Swiecki said many people think about image of a brand, rather than the way that brand has evolved over decades as the market has grown more diverse and competitive.

    "They will think, 'I'm buying a GM, I'm getting an American car,' " Swiecki said.

    Foreign car manufacturers generate billions of dollars in jobs and community infrastructure in the U.S., but there is a difference between Detroit's economic footprint and that of its foreign rivals.

    The Center for Automotive Research says Detroit's Big Three employed almost 240,000 people in the U.S. at the end of 2007. Foreign makers had about 113,00 U.S. employees at the time.

    The key difference in how the Big Three and foreign brands support jobs in the U.S. comes outside the factories, according to a 2006 study by the Level Field Institute, a group formed by Big Three retirees in Washington.

    "What's driving the difference in jobs ... is investment in research, design, engineering and management," Level Field President Jim Doyle said in a statement on the 2006 study.

    The Center for Automotive Research said the Big Three had 24,000 engineers on U.S. payrolls in 2007. The Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association said its member companies had 3,500 U.S. research and development employees in 2007.

    Level Field found that every 1,000 vehicles sold by Detroit's Big Three in the U.S. support more than twice as many jobs as 1,000 vehicles sold by foreign nameplates.

    Most Americans consumers understand that the industry is global, Swiecki said, and they are more savvy than ever in purchasing vehicles.

    "For the most part, gone are the days of people going to a car lot and paying a buck to take a swing of a hammer at a foreign-made car," Swiecki said.

    But there are exceptions.

    A Savannah, Georgia, Ford dealer sold 15 cars last weekend after he ran a radio ad blaming Japan for Detroit's financial funk.

    While 15 was substantially better than weekends before the ad, dealer O.C. Welch said, it was still about half of the business he did a year ago.

    "All you people that buy all your Toyotas and send that money to Japan, you know, when you don't have a job to make your Toyota car payment, don't come crying to me," Welch says in the ad. "All those cars are rice ready. They're not road ready."

    Sullivan, who was at an Atlanta, Georgia, dealership Thursday to pick up
    his American brand minivan from the service department, said he has had a different experience.

    He said the vehicle has given him trouble, and whenever he replaces it, he'll probably go with a foreign brand, regardless of whether any of the parts were made in the United States.

    "What I look for is good gas mileage, and when I pay it off in four or five years, it's still running," said Sullivan, who has owned several American and foreign brands. "It seems I get better quality with a foreign car."


    Find this article at:
    http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/12/12/american.cars

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  17. #21

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    Default Re: Do auto workers really earn $73 an hour?

    Quote Originally Posted by Greg View Post
    If Toyota pays their workers $30 and GM pays its union workers $29, why are the GM worker paying dues to the union-bosses? huh?
    Because GM also pays for the retirement benefits of 419,621 retired members and 120,723 surviving spouses.

    http://www.uaw.org/barg/07fact/fact02.php

    The reason Toyota is paying their workers $30 an hour is to prevent them from trying to organize labor unions in their plants.

    Tell me straight up- if GM was paying $10 an hour, do you think Toyota would be paying $30 an hour?

    Think about that for a minute before answering...

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  19. #22

    Default Re: Do auto workers really earn $73 an hour?



    How Unions Stop The Cars

    Shikha Dalmia 12.12.08, 3:20 PM ET

    With the late-night demise of legislation containing $14 billion in emergency loans to Detroit's automakers, pressure is once again mounting on President Bush to step in. And he is reportedly thinking of doing just that.

    But the very thing that doomed this legislation will also doom any effort to rescue the industry: union intransigence. If Bush cares more about taxpayers than kudos, he should decline.

    The legislation, backed by Sen. Bob Corker, a Tennessee Republican whose state itself is home to GM facilities, was the industry's best hope to return to health. It stripped some of the green baggage of the House bill that would have consigned Detroit to producing not cars that sell but what eco-warriors want. Nor would the legislation have handed quite as expansive powers of micromanagement to a car czar, forcing companies to obtain approval for basic product and capacity decisions.

    Instead, it offered the automakers a way to restructure their massive obligations to labor and debtors, much like a bankruptcy court would do but without the stigma. Bondholders would have been required to accept a 70% loss--the remainder paid in stock, not cash. And Big Labor's main concession (besides accepting some stock instead of cash for its health care trust fund) was that it set a definite date for a pay cut next year.

    At that time, its wages and benefits would fall in line with those that Nissan, Toyota and other automakers pay their U.S. workers.

    But the United Auto Workers reacted as if it had been asked to work in a Third World sweat shop and walked away. Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., decried efforts to "sock it" to American workers. Never mind that labor costs make every car rolling out of Detroit $1,500 more expensive to produce than foreign cars made elsewhere in the U.S. Indeed, last year, GM and Toyota sold the same number of cars worldwide, but Toyota turned a healthy profit--while GM posted a $40 billion loss.

    But the fact of the matter is that the wage cuts are a necessary condition to give Detroit a fighting chance for survival, but they're not sufficient. Indeed, that would require far more from unions.

    Car sales next year are expected to drop 40%. This means that if auto companies are going to use any bailout money to restore viability, they will have to be able to shed some of its quarter-million-strong workforce.

    However, if the UAW was unwilling to accept a pay cut, there is no reason to believe that it would compliantly accept such massive layoffs. More likely, it will use taxpayer money to keep every job alive as long as possible--and then return for more a few months later.

    Beyond job cuts, the UAW will also have to agree to eliminate a whole host of exceedingly rigid work rules for its remaining constituents. Such rules, for instance, had historically made it difficult to train auto workers for multiple jobs to fulfill multiple needs. No less than labor's extravagant wage demands, these rules have crimped Detroit's adaptability.

    Ford recently built a facility in Brazil where it can produce five different vehicle platforms at the same time, on the same line. What's more, many of its suppliers are housed in the facility as well, something that allows them to move parts to the assembly line at a moment's notice. Not only has this lowered Ford's production costs and boosted productivity, it has also given it flexibility to adjust its product mix to shifting market conditions. This is important at any time but is especially crucial now, when volatile oil prices are likely to produce abrupt shifts in consumer demand.

    But union rules, with their featherbedding requirements and crabbed job descriptions, make it much harder for such a factory-of-the-future to operate in the U.S.

    The irony is that foreign car makers are profitable in America--and the Detroit Three are profitable in every country but America. Only Big Labor can position Detroit carmakers for success in their own country. Bush shouldn't ask already-strapped taxpayers to make sacrifices to pull Detroit back from the precipice when its own key stakeholder won't.

    Shikha Dalmia is a senior analyst at the Los Angeles-based Reason Foundation.

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  21. #23

    Default Re: Do auto workers really earn $73 an hour?

    Quote Originally Posted by James48843 View Post
    Because GM also pays for the retirement benefits of 419,621 retired members and 120,723 surviving spouses.
    Let those people pay for all the Union Bo$$e$. They are the ones getting the gold-plated benefits.

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  23. #24

    Default Re: Do auto workers really earn $73 an hour?

    Quote Originally Posted by James48843 View Post

    Tell me straight up-
    Jimbo,

    Other than a single letter from NTEU, did the union fat-cats do anything to try to prevent the IFT limitations put on us? Did they?

    The union bosses take care of themselves and punish the workers. Being a union bo$$ is where the real money is now days. That's is why Obama's Chicago friend wanted to become one by selling the Senate seat.

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