[Retric]

Looking back including heath care and pension and adjusting for inflation, many autoworkers made over 100k/year in 2008 money. Benefits, and pensions are not "free" they cost the company money. A major problem at GM is they ignored the long term cost of these "benefits" and agreed to insane levels of compensation for their senior Union workers. When the times where good the company agreed to things assuming that times would always be good.

EX: The jobs bank program is not a big deal if you run the numbers assuming constant growth forever.

[captainobvious]

Looking back? GM made a bad bet in the 70's/80's. Many annuity companies made the same mistake. That doesn't mean that current workers are making 100K. All of these articles about paying current workers 100K are totally disingenuous.

They also all focus on how American workers at Japanese owned plants make so much less. They never mention that American-auto company executives make orders of magnitude more than their Japanese counterparts.

[Retric]

The problem is the "gate keepers" who let short term thinking infect their decision making process. I don't think it's the fault of the Auto Worker that they learned how to bargain. I don't think the banker messed up by making 500k. I think the people taking a negative amortization zero down payment loan on a house they can't afford could have made a good decision. Live in a house for 3 years at less than the cost of renting what's not to like?

PS: The Japanese Yen just increased 25% so a lot of these US vs Japan comparisons are not as unbalanced as you might think.

[gravitycop]

I don't think it's the fault of the Auto Worker that they learned how to bargain.

Indeed. It is the fault of the United States for legalizing (through exception in the RICO Act) corrupt organization of labor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_union#Criticism

unions are regarded as a form of legalized conspiracy and extortion. American racketeering statutes still include an exemption for union activity.

[captainobvious]

Those same racketeering statutes also do things like say prevent unions from making secondary-strikes, which is why unions in americahave been all but completely neutered for the last 100+ years.

[anamax]

> They never mention that American-auto company executives make orders of magnitude more than their Japanese counterparts.

That's because the total amount of money for executive compensation at US auto manufacturers is in the noise.

BTW - GM could probably handle the wages and pension if it got Toyota's work rules AND could concentrate on building the cars that it can sell at a profit and stop selling the ones on which it barely makes any money. The UAW won't accept Toyota's work rules at "American" auto makers and Congress insists on CAFE.

The folks who want an economy car prefer Toyota, Honda, etc. They'll only buy GM at a significantly lower price, which means that GM has to make money elsewhere. (And, thanks to the rule that says that GM's imports don't count toward CAFE, it gets to make them under UAW's GM rules.)

[mattmcknight]

Or, alternatively, the unions made some bad decisions and forced management to accept them. It's not the wages, it's the work rules. [1] The US car companies are "paying people to sit home and watch Oprah".

Completely agree on the executive compensation. Maybe the union should be abolished and management and employees should be given enough dividend producing equity to care about the actual profitability of the company. If management and the union drive these companies out of business, I'm paying their stupid pension.

[1] http://www.evolvingexcellence.com/blog/2008/12/its-work-rule...

[joe_the_user]

Also, US health care costs are approximately twice those of any other industrialized nation. Auto workers are not getting benefits that are disproportionate to workers elsewhere. Rather, auto companies are paying inflated rates for ordinary benefits. The entities which really benefit are the various health care monopolies (drug companies and so-forth).