"Blaming the workers" -- Jack Lessenberry, Metro Times

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http://www.metrotimes.com/news/story.asp?id=13518

12/10/2008

LABOR > POLITICS & PREJUDICES

Blaming the workers

BY JACK LESSENBERRY


Blame the workers. Especially, blame the United Auto Workers. That's what we've been hearing from the talking heads over the last several weeks as our auto industry skidded toward the brink of extinction and politicians debated a bailout.

Over and over again, I've heard people repeat that the trouble was that the average UAW worker costs the auto companies $73 per hour. Nice work if you can get it. Matter of fact, it made me want to pack a lunch bucket and trudge off to Dodge Main. Trouble is, when I checked, I found that this statistic is simply not true.

Unionized autoworkers, at least the relatively few still working, made about $28 an hour last year, according to Ann Arbor's respected Center for Automotive Research. Yes, they do get benefits, and benefits cost money. But how could they rack up another $45 an hour in bennies? The answer is that they don't.

Jonathan Cohn sagely reported in The New Republic how this figure was concocted: By taking the entire cost of health care and pensions for both active employees and retirees and adding it to the average hourly wage. Yes, health care and other benefits do cost the auto companies $42 an hour. But that's because they have so many retirees. General Motors has been around for almost a century. Ford, even longer. Toyota, which didn't open plants here until the 1980s, has very few retirees. Naturally their total labor costs are lower.

Yes, the United Auto Workers union did fight hard to win their workers decent salaries and benefits. (The nerve of those bastards!) Based on their real salaries, longtime autoworkers make about $60,000 a year. When you consider the physical stress and the repetitive motion injuries, that doesn't seem like such a good deal to me. And it is even worse now, since nobody working for the Not-So-Big Three knows if he or she will still have a job in a few months.

Yet life is not always fair. We need to ask the question: Are the unions and the salaries and the benefits paid their members really the reason the auto companies are on their knees?

Harley Shaiken is one of the most knowledgeable labor experts in the country. A Detroit native, he's now a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. I asked him if it's fair to blame the UAW for all, or even some, of the shape the domestic industry is in?

"No, I don't think so," he said. "I think the UAW has played an important role in rebuilding the industry. Were there excesses in the past? Of course. By everyone."

But that's not what has caused the present crisis; the credit crunch resulting from the Wall Street meltdown last September was the catalyst. "The automakers are asking Congress for $34 billion," Shaiken reminded me. "If the entire labor force volunteered to work for free next year, that would save them about $18 billion.

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