Link? Number one my husband works for GM so I know for a fact that the number you describe includes legacy-he has done payroll...you take the cost of health care, wages, retirement of all GM workers-former and current, next you divide by the number of current workers. Thus the cost of former workers is used in this calculation. the excerpt I provided for you showing how these figures are calculated does not even take in the new contracts...new hires start at $14.00 per hour...since GM has bought out many and laid off many more higher wage workers, they will be hiring the low cost employees during any upturn in sales-no call backs.
The New York Times told readers that GM’s autoworkers are paid $70 an hour (including health care and pension). This is not true. The base pay is about $28 an hour. If health care cost per worker average $12,000 per year, that adds in another $6 an hour. If the pension payment takes up 25 percent of base pay (an extremely high pension), that gets you another $7 an hour, bringing the total to $41 an hour. That’s decent pay, but still a long way from $70 an hour. Again, you have to be an American manufacturing hater to provide false information as many times as you have.
‘How does the NYT get from $41 to $70? Well the trick is to add in GM’s legacy costs, the pension and health care costs for retired workers. These legacy costs are a serious expense for GM, but this is not money being paid to current workers. The person on the line in 2008 is not benefiting from these legacy cost’
Hard to argue with GM’s own site.
http://www.gm.com/corporate/responsibility/reports/05/500_economic/3_thirty/530.html
In 2004, the last full year for data, GM’s worldwide payrolls from continuing operations totaled $21.5 billion, up from $20.9 billion in 2003. In the United States, hourly payroll totaled $8.7 billion. The average labor cost per hour for the U.S. hourly work force, which includes both wages and benefits, was $73.73 in 2004.