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Confirmed User
Industry Role:
Join Date: Dec 2004
Location: Denver
Posts: 6,559
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Quote:
Originally Posted by tony404
they dont get paid $78 dollars an hour for the 500th time.Also foreign car companies in the place where the bulk of their workers dont have to pay for pensions or healthcare because they are government supplied.
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Sorry dude, it's not like it's hard information to find. 
(check out the bolded areas)
http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/...2_FORTUNE5.htm
Quote:
DETROIT -(Dow Jones)- The United Auto Workers, thrust in the middle of high- stakes wrangling over a rescue package for the U.S. auto industry, is determined to avoid culpability for a collapse of Detroit's auto makers while defending the wages and benefits of its workers.
The debate has put the union in the unlikely position of arguing that its workers are no better off than their non-unionized counterparts.
The UAW took much of the blame for Thursday's late-night rejection of $14 billion in emergency auto loans for General Motors Corp. (GM) and Chrysler LLC. Several senators said they opposed the measure because the union refused to accept wage concessions to make the auto makers competitive with the U.S. operations of foreign-based rivals.
"It sounds like the UAW blew it up," Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., told reporters following the Senate's rejection of an aid package.
UAW President Ron Gettelfinger shot back Friday, casting the wage issue as a calculated, fact-twisting attack on organized labor.
"The GOP caucus was insistent the restructuring be done on the backs of our workers and retirees," Gettelfinger said in a hastily arranged news conference Friday morning. "Other stakeholders were not being held to the same standard organized labor was."
The auto makers and union are now awaiting word on whether the Bush administration will come to the rescue with money that had been earmarked for the financial sector from the Treasury Department's $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program.
Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., the lead negotiator for the Republicans, said the emergency loan deal fell through Thursday because the union refused to agree to a labor cost reduction next year. He said Republicans would have accepted any date in 2009.
The rescue compromise would have dealt a financial blow to labor unions, management, suppliers, dealers, investors and bond holders.
Gettelfinger, in mounting his defense, said that despite reservations he agreed on Thursday to enter into what he considered risky negotiations with Corker.
"We wondered if we were being set up," Gettelfinger said.
One UAW official involved in the negotiations said the wrangling Thursday was "as ugly as I've seen it. Corker said, 'This is what's it's going to be. There will be no negotiations,' " the official said.
Eventually, Gettelfinger said, the UAW and Corker settled on a tentative deal that didn't include immediate wage cuts for UAW-represented workers at Detroit's auto makers. But the Senate rejected the aid package anyway.
The wage rate of union auto workers has become a battle cry against GM and Chrysler's efforts to secure low-interest loans the companies say they need to survive into next year. UAW critics contend union labor costs amount to about $ 78 an hour in wages and benefits while workers employed by companies such as Toyota Motor Corp. (TM) make closer to $45 an hour in wages and benefits.
The $78 figure, however, includes hourly wages, medical benefits and pension payments for hourly workers, along with medical benefits and pension payments for hundreds of thousands of retired workers.
The wages and benefits of hourly UAW workers - not counting retirees - actually amount to about $60 an hour. If only wages are counted, veteran workers make about $26 an hour.
New hires, meantime, make about $15 an hour, close to the starting wage of Toyota's U.S. workers. Gettelfinger argued Friday that UAW wages already compete with those paid by foreign competitors. He quoted a statement on a Toyota Web site, which he said bragged that Toyota factory workers make more than those employed by Detroit's auto makers.
Furthermore, Gettelfinger said, the UAW is being asked to match Toyota's wage rate without complete information on the Japanese auto maker's cost structure.
"We were prepared to make further sacrifices," he said. The union agreed last week to allow the auto makers to postpone multi-billion-dollar payments into a union-run retiree health care trust and suspend the so-called jobs banks program under which laid off workers get wages and benefits.
In the wake of reaching a new labor contract in 2007, the auto makers said the deal would get their cost structure more in line with the U.S. operations of foreign-based rivals. In addition to last year's concessions, the union two years earlier agreed to shift more medical costs to its retirees.
But a steep sales decline this year has stymied much of the savings from the labor deal. Most of the lower-wage new hires have been laid off - or were never hired - as Detroit's auto makers race to cut production. U.S. auto sales are down 16% through November, with domestic auto makers suffering far steeper declines than their foreign-based rivals.
Gettelfinger said Friday he appreciates that the government is considering the TARP fund to aid the auto makers. He doesn't, however, expect the White House will initiate negotiations with the union on terms.
JP Morgan analyst Himanshu Patel said Friday it's likely that Treasury Department demands from the union will be similar to those in the Corker plan. " Today's news that the UAW rejected the Corker plan demand of nearly immediate wage/benefit cuts for existing workers likely will not prove popular with the public," Patel wrote in a research note.
-By Sharon Terlep, Dow Jones Newswires; 248-204-5532; sharon.terlep@ dowjones.com.
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