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MotoramicThe best of 11,394 comments on autoworker pay and a reply from Steven Rattner
Our story Friday about former Obama auto task force head Steven Rattner suggesting UAW workers at General Motors should have taken a pay cut in the bailout, and the three-tier pay scale at a Detroit-area GM factory, drew over 11,000 comments and a response from Rattner. Here's what they say about working in America:
Three years ago today, then-President George W. Bush announced he would lend money to General Motors and Chrysler, kicking off the largest auto industry bailout in U.S. history. Even as the industry has rebounded, the politics of the decision still linger over the industry -- and have powered the larger debate over the future of the American economy that will unfold in next year's elections.
It's inevitable that any public debate about autoworkers' wages becomes a pro vs. anti-union shoutfest, so kudos to those of you who brought some decorum, like this from Bob D. suggesting personal demand, not money supply, was the problem:
Five years ago I was in a car wreck and lost my job because I couldn't work for 3 years. I was broke and living out of my truck basically. I have a job making 8.50 an hour right now in an area with high overhead. Take home is roughly 1300 a month. I own a piece of property and have it set up with a fifth wheel I bought and plan on building a house when I find a better paying job or get promoted. It is hard, sometimes I would love to go eat somewhere nice, but I just can't. I do have a deep freezer full of venison and hog meat I shot, and a ton of veggies I grew myself though. I still manage to save about 2-250 a month for my house and future family. You can't tell me it can't be done. Everyone just needs to understand the difference in what you need and what you want.
Many commenters questioned if UAW workers should be thankful for having a job at all, let alone earning what they do. Commenter AugustF summed it up this way:
The UAW did themselves in when they demanded ridiculous $/hr for people that are unskilled laborers. I mean giving someone putting owners manuals in the cars $100K/yr is insane. I am so tired of people talking about how this company or that company or the government is screwing people over. If you want to make more money, you have to get an education and do something the requires the ability to think. If you get a good job, but it doesn't provide you with the income you need, then improve your skills so you can get a better job. That is how you move up in this world. Jobs pay what the work is worth in value created. The reason why we lost our manufacturing base is because people kept wanting more from doing a job that does provide the value of a higher salary. People were willing to do it cheaper elsewhere and to compete in the marketplace, firms had to move the manufacturing base. If people would have accepted the wages they would have been employed. They might not have the kind of lifestyle they see on TV reality shows, but they would have a decent middle class life
This comment by Rooster reflected several replies to that line:
Hot, loud, nerveracking. In assembly plants you have roughly 1:10 to 1:30 to do your specific job before you move on to the next, and you do this around 400 times a day. You need to be calm, and have good manual dexterity, and move deliberately, precisely and swiftly. In distribution warehouses, you might pick anywhere between 1000-10,000 parts daily and be expected to have an error rate of 1 per thousand parts picked. Its not easy, not just anyone can do it and thrive, and trust me, we all earned every cent of our wages, every day.
And Steven Rattner wrote on his blog that he either misspoke or was misquoted after his speech about whether autoworkers should have taken a pay cut as part of the rescues.
So let me be clear, I have no desire to see auto workers (or anyone else) take a pay cut. The members of President Obama's Auto Task Force did not work as hard as we did in order for workers to see their pay slashed.
However...
We are competing more and more against countries whose workers are paid a small fraction of what American workers are paid but whose productivity is getting closer and closer to U.S. levels (in some cases, even exceeding it.) All I was trying to say was that if we had achieved more shared sacrifice at the time of the restructurings, we would be in a better position to retain more American jobs in the face of this competition. I wish sacrifice was not necessary. I hope we can get to a place where the wages of all American workers could go up, instead of sideways or down. But that will require a massive retooling of the American economy, which is all I was trying to say.
This is the great pinch point; how can Americas compete against workers willing to do the same job in a different country for a fraction of the cost? What's not as well known is just how much other countries face the same question.
Autoworker wages in the United States run from $30/hour for long-time UAW employees at Detroit plants to $14 for an entry-level worker at some U.S. automakers and the Kia plant in Georgia. (Contractors and suppliers who work inside plants get that $9/hour wage). In Germany, wages run about $40 an hour. In Japan, they're closer to the $28 a senior UAW employee earns here. In both countries, governments provide the health care and retirement benefits paid for by the automakers here.
In Mexico, autoworkers average roughly $3.50 an hour -- and even that wage was under pressure, as some suppliers sought wage cuts to compete with work moving to China where wages can run $5 a day. So far, no Chinese-built vehicles have sold in large numbers in the United States, and no mass-market automaker has any public plans to do so at the moment. In fact, the United States has a $3.7 billion trade surplus with China in motor vehicles through September 2011. Based on the trends, Mexico may have already surpassed Japan as the largest exporter of cars and trucks to the United States by dollar value.
Every country with an auto industry spent billions of dollars helping it survive the global economic downturn of 2008-9. Every automaker of global scale has also shifted work from its homeland to low-cost foreign countries, the latest moves coming from Japanese companies threatening to move jobs to Thailand, Vietnam and China due to a stronger yen.
Maybe the world's economy needs a reinvention. Maybe screwing together cars is a task best done by those not yet in the middle class, or maybe raising the world's collective wages would lessen a dash for the cheapest set of hands. Like all of the world's toughest problems, this one won't be solved without working not just harder, but smarter.
