Go to An Unfortunate Outburst of Intense Patriotism
- Add a comment
- Go to AIG Bonuses Grounds for Punitive Taxation, Contempt of Contracts?
Wages & benefits
No,
you should do your homework on wages & benefits combined. The $75 figure bandied about so much includes the wages and benefits for all workers,
current, retired and DEAD! From FactCheck.org:
"A report from the conservative Heritage Foundation, opposing the auto industry bailout, said that members of the United Auto Workers union "earn $75 an hour in wages and benefits – almost triple the earnings of the average private sector worker." Later in the report, it's phrased this way: "The vast majority of UAW workers in Detroit today still earn $75 an hour."
The problem is, that's just not true. The automakers say that the average wage earned by its unionized workers is about $29 per hour. So how does that climb to more than $70? Add in benefits: life insurance, health care, pension and so on. But not just the benefits that the current workers actually receive – after all, it's pretty rare for the value of a benefits package to add up to more than wages paid, even with a really, really good health plan in place.
What's causing the number to balloon is the cost of providing benefits to tens of thousands of retired auto workers and their surviving spouses.
The automakers arrived at the $70+ figure by adding up all the costs associated with providing wages and benefits to current and retired workers and dividing the total by the number of hours worked by current employees."
Sounded too good to be true, didn't it? $75 an hour (including benefits) would result in riots, bribery and contract killings...just to get an assembly line job. But is it fair to include retirees & their widows into the formula? That's like combining your current salary with your retirement earnings...before you retire. But in anticipation, those retirement benefits were negotiated by the unions & the automakers, often trading short-term wages concession for better retirement. Are you gonna blame the unions for out-negotiating those poor, poor automakers? Have you bought a car lately?
BTW, before we try to get the car makers to file bankruptcy and abrogate their contracts with the unions, I read in a Pew Research report that the cost, to the taxpayer, of covering the health-care costs of retired UAW workers would be MORE than the costs of the loan guarantees we've made.
posted by
VanArsdale
on April 2, 2009 at 11:22 PM
| link to this | reply
Re: Reneging on contracts
"I think it's proper for a company being kept afloat by taxpayer dollars to have restrictions on how much and how they pay."
Then please explain Senator Chris Dodd's specific allowance in the Porkulus for companies to pay bonuses with taxpayer dollars that they'd agreed to pay under contract before passage of the Porkulus (see
http://feeds.foxnews.com/~r/foxnews/politics/~3/Ge2taiiAu4o/sen-dodds-political-future-cloudy-aig-bonus-controversy),
I take note of the contrast: "Asking for 'wage concessions'" versus forcible overthrow of contracts by government fiat.
Also, you might do some homework on the actual costs of wages and benefits combined.
posted by
WriterofLight
on March 22, 2009 at 12:44 PM
| link to this | reply
Reneging on contracts
...the Right Wingers had NO problem abrogating the union contracts of UAW employees. So it's OK to ask for "wage concessions" for blue collar workers making an average of $24.50 (not the Bulls*** $74 figure being floated by anti-union flacks). Many of these "retention bonuses" were for employees
who have already left the company! Isn't a bonus something you get for doing a
good job? I think it's proper for a company being kept afloat by taxpayer dollars to have restrictions on how much and how they pay. If we can require a single mom with kids to work or train X-number of hours per week and prohibit them from owning a car worth more than $3,000 in order to get AFDC, then we can tell people making six-figures that "No, you don't get a $6 million bonus!"
posted by
VanArsdale
on March 18, 2009 at 11:56 AM
| link to this | reply
Schumer is a totally controlled being. Yet, It is not the bailout per se that is angering Americans...its where the money is going. It is going abroad and to people who were already bailed out!
posted by
Soul_Builder101
on March 17, 2009 at 11:45 PM
| link to this | reply