$58-an-Hour UAW Workers Kill $16K Ford Bonus as Stingy

Townhall ^ | 10/12/11 | John Ransom

[Right Wing Assault]

I hope the OWS people find out about this! March on their homes!

[taildragger]

Careful folks...

The $58 number is total compensation down from the $72 average.

Some things to ponder.

* This was Wayne Assemby ( Wayne ave and Michigan Ave ) where they used to make all the SUV's and now make the larger Escorts. Their will be other products of that platform and other cars coming their. For what it is worth, I don't understand the beef, out of how many votes this lost by 56 militant unionist.
* Lets see what the other plants do.
* If they do something as stupid, then IMHO Mulally should play hardball.
* Don't forget, this is on top of taking the "Fusion" back from Mexico to "Flat Rock" where the Mustang is made for a net gain of 7000 jobs.

If you add all that up, They can sign me up tomorrow if these guys don't want to do the work...

Let us hope this is 56 loons and not a trend at a number of plants to go.....

[Right Wing Assault]

I knew a guy quite some years ago when car sales were hot who made over $100k one year because he worked so much overtime. I wonder what the pay would be with all that overtime now.

[DH]

You just have to love what Unions do for the areas they have control of.

For example, take my 2,900 sq ft house down here in South Texas. It cost me $175,000 3 years ago. The same house in a heavy unionized state would cost about $500,000.

Why? Non right to work state unions. Down here you get paid what you are worth. Up there, they are paid by what they can demand from their employers with absolutely no regard to worth.

The union “circle” that I have recognized early in life is that the parasites claim that the cost of living has risen to the point that they need to strike for more pay. They strike, get more pay, and suddenly all of the other prices in the area rise too. Then the circle begins again, over and over and over.

[freedomfiter2]

Not bad. That’s about double what a roofer makes.

[muawiyah]

The typical deal involving "cash on top of salary and benefits" means IT DOESN'T COUNT FOR RETIREMENT.

You only get to set aside money in your 401(k) based on your regular income ~ not any bonuses or special payments. Plus, if there's a years of service times high 3 or high 5 situation, none of this counts towards that amount.

Companies and governments have been getting away for this quite some time because during ordinary times, when folks have jobs, someone with a job isn't otherwise supporting half a dozen additional dependents ~ e.g. brother in law with his sister's 5 kids, and so on.

The niggling small amounts begin to loom large in the minds of the hard pressed, particularly those facing imminent retirement.

It's a case of FORD GREED versus EMPLOYEE'S NEED. Just one of the reasons unions happen in the auto industry.

[frposty]

They don’t need a bailout. Management needs to refuse to pay them amounts so high that the company can’t compete. If the workers strike, move the company offshore.

[SoJoCo]

Most CEOs and small business owners make less than that.

I can't speak for small business owners, but my new CEO makes $480 an hour. And her bonus is about 550 times larger than that.

[Oceander]

I can't speak for small business owners, but my new CEO makes $480 an hour. And her bonus is about 550 times larger than that.

Maybe you applied for the wrong job, then?

[SoJoCo]

Maybe you applied for the wrong job, then?

Apparently. Her predecessor was a train wreck and walked away with something like $40 million after less than a year on the job. I could probably screw things up as badly as he did and I'd do it for half the money, too.

[muawiyah]

The National is not in synch with the bargaining unit. If you want to find some bureaucratic bureaucrats that's where you go ~ to the national.

If UAW ever had open and free elections all those people would be on the street.

[muawiyah]

Your house, and that formerly $500,000 house, are both worth about $98,000 in this market and nobody can get a mortgage!

The real source of the problem were the several million Latin American construction workers who came here to do SIP construction.

They and their employers overwhelmed the system and now we have a 15 year overhang of slowmoving, undersold, or unsold houses.

[muawiyah]

You also have to watch for the old trick where management ~ to make itself look good ~ combines total costs and divides by total workhours of assembly line employees.

That's where you get the $75 per hour "costs" ~ but that'll include the CEO's salary, his executive suite, white collar and salaried employees, retirees, medical plan, design engineers, sweepers, truckers and a whole host of other people who do not do ON HANDS vehicle assembly or parts manufacturing (note, folks, in a UAW plant an engine is a "part").

You can be a production line worker making $20 an hour Fur Shur. In the good old days you'd have a base pay of $1.60 per hour, and the only way you could get the good stuff at $5 an hour would be to successfully bid off on on a machinist position ~ that's where you fit in to do the part the machine isn't designed to do by itself yet. Minimum wage was $1.15 so that extra .45 was definitely good money.

When I see these stories I always ask "what is the base pay in that plant". That's where the game starts ~ not with the corporate management claim of "costs per hour" ~ they lie a lot too but only their tax collector knows eh.

[central_va]

I am as anti union as the next guy but labor is only about 10% of a new cars MSRP. Moving a factory to Mexico will not lower the cost much, if any. Those are the facts.

[Kegger]

... Not bad. That’s about double what a roofer makes. ...


Well said.

[SoJoCo]

That’s about double what a roofer makes.

If most roofers weren't illegal aliens then they'd probably be making closer to the assembly line workers.

[LibertyRocks]

OMG!!! Nearly $60.00/hr. for jobs that generally take about a week to train for? That’s absolutely SICKENING! And these people have the NERVE to complain that they aren’t being paid enough, and that they don’t have enough benefits? Sounds like THEY are more likely in the 1% than the rest of us!

[freedomfiter2]

Exactly. Construction workers in this country are the targets of class warfare. The elites are using illegals to push down wages. By the way, thanks to the corrupt bankers I hve been forced to go back to construction.

[Oceander]

Apparently. Her predecessor was a train wreck and walked away with something like $40 million after less than a year on the job. I could probably screw things up as badly as he did and I'd do it for half the money, too.

You bring up, at least obliquely, an interesting point: notwithstanding that the Wall Street protestors are snake-oil salesman, peddling a lethally toxic "cure" for what ails us, there are some systemic problems with aspects of corporate governance, including that for many of the large corporations, the checks and balances between the shareholders, the board of directors, and the officers that are supposed to keep everyone's interests more or less balanced seem to have broken down. There is at least some reason to believe that for large public corporations, the shareholders' role in controlling the board of directors has broken down, with the result that the board of directors no longer properly serves to protect the interests of the shareholders as against overreaching by the officers. This problem, to the extent it exists, appears to be exacerbated in many instances by the fact that the officers at one corporation are often directors at another, otherwise unrelated, corporation, and that as a result there is a lot of informal pressure for individuals acting in their capacity as director to agree too readily to the demands of the officers (usu. for more compensation) because that individual, when acting as officer for another corporation, may suffer the consequences of not being agreeable enough (don't know if that too-long sentence makes sense; hopefully it does).

In short, it may be necessary to start a serious discussion about possible changes to the way in which corporations, particularly large publicly traded corporations, are structured, owned and managed.

A large part of that conversation should involve the various tax issues that affect corporations and shareholders and whether, and to what extent, the treatment of those issues has tended to incentivize shareholders to abdicate their traditional role as watchers over the board of directors. For example, shareholders who derive most of their profit from their corporate investments in the form of dividends are much more likely to keep a watchful eye on management because each dollar that goes out as officer compensation reduces the money available for dividends. On the other hand, shareholders who derive most of their profit from their corporate investments in the form of capital gains from trading shares of stock are not as likely to keep a watchful eye on management's compensation because (a) if they don't like what's going on, they can always sell the stock and move on, and (b) their gains are derived from other people's perceptions of the value of the stock, and not necessarily from the actual performance of the company, outsize compensation paid to supposedly skilled upper management can be perceived as a sign that the company is going to do really well in the future given the supposed skills of management and therefore if outsize compensation increases the perception of future profitability, the value of the stock, and therefore the current shareholder's profits will go up, without regard to whether or not the overpaid management ever really manages to perform as promised.

Additionally, there might be some backstops that could be added to, e.g., the Bankruptcy Code that would permit the trustee for the estate of a bankrupt corporation to claw back the performance-based compensation paid to upper management in the year prior to the filing of the bankruptcy petition (although 2 to 3 years' period would probably be better in order to prevent management from gaming the rules by front-loading performance-based compensation and then converting everything to straight pay just before the start of that 1-year period).

Basically, I think that because the general rules of free-market economics imply that, in the absence of market distortions and in the presence of sufficient market actors on both sides of the equation, there should be pressure tending to keep the compensation of upper management down, there is some sort of systemic market distortion - almost certainly caused by one or more government policies, usually through indirect or unintended effects - that are preventing the usual market forces from operating in this area.

[tallyhoe]

Well the article says that Auto workers make 56 to 58 an hr. I worked in the A/V manufacturing and I made $33.00 an hr of course I had been there awhile! With benefits we were getting upwards of $65 to $70. So UAW workers always made more than we did cause their Union was stronger!!