Posted on 10/01/2017 4:41:09 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
MEXICO CITY -- Autoworker Ivan Flores spends his days transporting parts for U.S.-bound Audi SUVs at a plant in central Mexico, but he laughs when asked if he could ever buy one of the $40,000 Q5 SUVs the plant produces on his $2.25 per hour salary.
"For us it is a dream to buy a Q5; we never could," said Flores, 40, who supports three sons on his roughly $110 weekly paycheck.
The premise of the auto industry since the time of Henry Ford was that workers would earn enough to buy the cars they produced. Across the U.S. and Europe, the arrival of an auto plant meant the creation of middle-class communities, with employees taking vacations, buying homes, cars, perhaps even cottages and boats....
(Excerpt) Read more at nwaonline.com ...
Well, I do think that Ivan Flores can afford a Model T.
Yeah, I won’t be buying a Mexican-built Q5, Audi. You could have built a U.S. plant like BMW (Greenville) and Mercedes (Tuscaloosa) did, but NOOOOO! Heck, even cheaper sister company VW is here, in Chattanooga, but you located in Mexico? Good luck with that.
He should get it one piece at a time, and it won’t cost him a dime.
Corporatism-Globalism, the “swamp” that needs to be drained.
Steve Bannon was down to help Roy Moore the other day and the process of defeating RINO’s who support this kind of stuff needs to continue big time.
Every member of House that voted for Paul Ryan as Speaker should go.....
>>Why have Mexican auto salaries stagnated or declined while pay for Chinese autoworkers rose, despite all the promises that free trade would increase Mexican wages? That’s the question U.S. negotiators asked at the third round of NAFTA talks in Ottawa, Ontario, last week.
Because it’s still a better deal for the workers than the other jobs available in the dysfunctional Mexican economy. The country is a kleptocracy cum narco state, so the economic dysfunction mirrors that of the government.
The premise of “free trade” is a perpetuation of slavery by other means... evidently.
Audi is exploiting the poor. They pay Mexicans $20/day to build vehicles that they market to yuppies in the U.S. for $40,000-$50,000. That’s why a border tariff should be part of any tax reform passed by Congress. It would raise billions from those companies who have ripped us off for years by employing Mexicans instead of U.S. workers.
I live in Brownsville and have family in Matamoros. $2 an hour at about 16:1, plus about 60 hours a week is enough for a Mexican family of 6 to live reasonably comfortably.
People like to act like a couple USD an hour, or even a day in some places, is some kind of crime. It sounds like chicken feed to us, but when you’re there, you see that it DOES work
Alexis de Tocqueville said, “America is great because she is good. If America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.”
The same is true for Mexico.
Autoworker Ivan Flores needs to look south to Mexico City for the solution.
Take up the topic with Carlos Slim or the talking head at Univision.
Autoworker Ivan Flores could lock arms, kneel, and join a trade union. /sarc altert
The price of the car has nothing to do with how much the workers are making. If those are the best jobs that those workers can find, they are fortunate to have at least that.
It is a failure of Mexico, not the US, that those are the best jobs the country can generate for them.
NISSAN opened a plant in Aguascalientes, Mexico. They gave them about 5 square miles to built a massive plant. Now they teach Japanese in the high school, and in the hotels it is common to find receptionist who speak a little Japanese. I ran into a dozen of them at the airport in Mexico City on Sept. 19th at the BIG earthquake of 8.1.
Auto companies provide a lot of freebies. Sometimes they send school buses into the colonies they built and they get free transport to work. They get a Dispensa...a bag of food, sick leave, vacations, the pay is not that good, but the infrastructure of the country is cheaper. We don;t have silly frivialous law suits about guys grabbing a girls buns, or someone filed a lawsuit for being LEERED at. in Mexico there are not so many rules about descrimination. A tranny prbably wouldn;t want to work at NISSAN. Maybe a tranny would want to dance at the local bar or something.
In Monterrey, they have worked HARD to keep the union away, and they are not nearly as powerful in Mexico as the UAW is in Detroit. It all enter into the final price tag of the vehicle.
More times than not, CEO’s will leave a company after poor performance and rake in millions as they walk out the door.
Then...tax time, various tax organizations release lists of fortune 500 companies who pay little or NO income tax at all.
Capitalism? More like crony capitalism.
Psychobilly Audi
I thought the same thing...
The wage you earn can be relative to the economy you live in. During the summers of 1964 and 1965, I worked in a GE manufacturing plant for $2.10 an hour, which was a good wage for the time since you could rent an apartment for $75 to $150 per month; you could buy a new Ford for less than $3,0000 and eat on $10 a week.
Unfortunately, most Mexicans can afford only an old used car and have a much lower standard of living than US citizens.
Back then the illegal Mexican laborers standing in front of Home Depot were making $12 dollars an hour for unskilled labor, which would only require a little over three years to purchase the house.
It is a meager living. I've seen for years along the Texas/Mexican border, shanty towns pieced together with corrugated tin/plywood surrounding some of the Maguiladoras pumping out product for U.S. corporations. It's a nightmare.
Crony capitalism exploits cheap labor all the while reaping huge profits...then paying paltry wages.
I am grateful to live in a country that is based off of the capitalistic economic system, but that's not what we are talking about. Over the last couple of three decades, capitalism as we knew it has morphed into a perverted system that only appears capitalistic.
Think about it for a moment. Globalist elites that have perfected the art of sucking as much $$$ from corporations all the while slashing compensation/benefits for the average worker. Many of these people have more money than many small countries total GDP. I don't begrudge wealth or the system in which wealth is gained, but we have millions of people out of work, millions that cannot put together $500 bucks for an emergency in this country. Wages have stagnated over the last decade and a half while the folks up top rake in hundreds of millions.
Nafta was sold to the American people in part on the premise that it would reduce illegal immigration into the U.S. by lifting the standard of living for the average Mexican worker...it did not. When manufacturing cost rose, plants were then shuttered and shipped to Eastern block Europe or Asia. U.S. workers gained nothing from NAFTA.
It wasn’t a “premise” it was a conscious decision later by Ford... he didn’t start the business with that goal.
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