Why a millionaire wants autoworkers to take a pay cut

[Peter1x9]

http://autos.yahoo.com/blogs/motoramic/why-millionaire-wants-autoworkers-pay-cut-160603932.html

Former auto czar and wealthy Wall Street financier Steven Rattner told a luncheon in Detroit on Thursday that while the $50 billion GM bailout was successful, "we should have asked the UAW to do a bit more. We did not ask any UAW member to take a cut in their pay." He also said that "friends on Wall Street" were concerned by GM's earnings and communications with the market, pushing the stock down to a level that would lose the goverment $14 billion if it sold its shares today.

Meanwhile, at General Motors' Orion Township, Mich., plant about 45 minutes away from where Rattner spoke, there are three tiers of hourly workers. Roughly 900 workers at the top tier, the most senior UAW workers, make $29 an hour, a rate unchanged since 2008. Another 500 or so UAW workers are paid about $16 an hour — a rate, adjusted for inflation, equal to the famed $5 a day Henry Ford started paying his workers in 1914.

And at the bottom scale are 200-odd workers technically employed by an outside supplier but who work in the plant moving parts to the assembly line, jobs once done by GM workers paid $29 an hour. The contractors' pay: $9 an hour with no health care, a rate which over a year's work would leave them below the poverty level for a family of four.





This is the same mentality that wrecked the country. You can't expect people with American level expenses to be able to live and buy your products on 3rd world wages. Even way back at the start, Henry Ford knew you had to pay workers a decent wage. Now his same company is paying new workers way less than Henry Ford (adjusted for inflation) did.

The current model of American expenses on 3rd world wages is unsustainable...and credit has all but dried up now. And then there's all those companies that ship their jobs overseas, yet still expect to be able to sell things here. The Rich and their puppets in the government have destroyed the country.