Originally Posted by tony404

yeah a newspaper is the same as some guy with a blogspot account. I quote some of the comments:
Professor Perry,

You realize that your graph is mislabeled because it should be labeled ?Hourly Labor Cost?. GM's labor cost and UAW employee compensation are not one and the same. Labor cost is aggregated to include benefits that employees do not receive whereas employee compensation is individualized to actual wages and benefits. GM uses quantifiable labor costs to make business case decisions, but no employee actually receives that amount of pay and benefits.

And this one

These are some scary words for an economics professor. And it reveals a real lack of knowledge of what is going on with bargaining.

First, the nonorganized assembly plants (the Nissans, Toyotas, Hondas, etc.) pay COMPETITIVE WAGES AND BENEFITS. They do this for a reason -- to keep their workers union-free. That means, their hourly wages and bene packages are COMPARABLE to those negotiated by the UAW. So if you think a production worker earning $23 an hour is offensive because he only has a high school degree, then take your grievance up with Toyota. (note to the world: do you think they are going to continue to pay those "competitive wages" if the UAW contracts are going to be majorly concessionary?)

But union labor costs are much higher. Why? The backloaded costs of retiree healthcare and pensions. Their "legacy costs" are much lower because they are newer operations (not many workers have made it to retirement). Moreover, these companies make it very difficult for workers to make it to retirment (just listen to the difference between a worker who has been at honda for 1 year versus 15 -- ask them about workplace injuries and how accommodating their companies are when their production system caused them to wreck their bodies).

The bottom line is that union negotiated contracts have a long view -- that workers are not fungible robots. that if workers are injured and give their health to their companies, they deserve to be treated well. And what is so wrong about our parents/grandparents (heck, even ourselves) having healthcare from their employer when they retire? or pensions? Isn't that removing the burden from the rest of us? What screws these workers now is that their employers don't have the marketshare. and that has NOTHING to do with their "union contracts" (anyone check out the recent harbour report which reported that almost all of the most productive auto assembly plants in the US are union?). They are even screwed by their own employers because the assembly plants they leave in the US are the heavy gas-guzzling truck and SUV types.

It's very sad to me that there is this vein of sick schadenfreude going through the keystrokes of everyone who has an opinion about Big 3 bargaining. You can have opinions I disagree with, but know the whole story first. At the end of the day, you might say that workers making a product that enriches shareholders beyond their wildest dreams should only make minimum wage. That's your world view. I think that those workers deserve better. And if they come together collectively to bargain, isn't that the freest expression of the free market?