You are not looking at this the right way. The difference is that non-UAW workers cost their companies 70.4% of what UAW workers cost. If GM spends $1,000,000 per year at some plant on employee costs, its rival Toyota spends $704,000 per year for the same plant. That is a significant number, the difference is huge.

The example you provided, although is a good estimate, is not that accurate. 1 worker does not build the entire car in 28 hours. There are hundreds if not thousands of workers at a plant. The DaimlerChrysler assembly line at Bramalea makes about 1 car per minute. If it takes 28 hours to build a car, in those same 28 hours there will be 1680 cars built by the plant if we discard the initial 28 hours. Without knowing how many workers are employed at the plant, you cannot estimate how much it translates to in terms of cost per car. Assuming 1000 workers, GM would pay 17.76 * 1000 * 28 = $497,280 extra for those cars. Divide it by 1680 cars, and the cost increase per car is $296. But let's take the number of employees from the Oshawa plant, which is 3300. It means that the customer will have to pay $976.80 more for a GM car than if that same car was built by Toyota plant or Honda plant. Then look at cars like Cobalt and Aveo, which cost about 10 - 13K for base models. This is a cost that any consumer would not pay if that was the case.

And if GM's goal is to stay competitive, its expenses per unit must be minimized, including labour costs.

 

You make it sound like there's a UAW tax or something. As someone else pointed out those "costs" are mostly health care for families in the USA. I'm fine paying a few extra dollars for a car and knowing that everyone involved in making it got a fair shake.

 

i think guy makes the best point
if white collar guys are paying in, so should blue collar

 

i guess if union greed, overpay, chronic laziness, poor quality workmanship and productivity are a fair shake then go for it. unions are just spoilt rotten and refuse to die and assimilate with the rest of the free market workforce and make less money for a basically unskilled job which others will do for much less. then people bitch when jobs get outsourced to other countries.

unions (all of them not just the UAW) need to die now. bloodsucking relics of the past.

 

I'm a UAW member and I've never seen anything like what you describe.

 

i have family in the UAW and they see the same things as i mentioned above.

of course ther are a few exceptions, but most UAW workes are substandard.

 

I wouldn't go to say that most UAW workers are substandard, it only takes one bad apple to spoil the barrel (or something like that... hehe). Honestly it's probably more the UAW leadership that's the problem then the actual UAW workers.

But still I do believe that the UAW should except the same benefits package that the white collar workers have. That's only fair and would save costs.

 

Besides the other very good responses to this point, you also need to remember that there are UAW workers at more than just the OEM's. It's even worse for the suppliers with UAW contracts and benfits to deal with. When you're a supplier who's bidding on a new contract and your price gets undercut by anywhere from $1.00 to $3.00 dollars per piece by a non-UAW supplier, then you just lost hundreds of millions of dollars over the lifetime of that contract (and hundreds of UAW workers just got laid off).

I also agree that not all UAW members are bad workers, but that contract prevents you from doing anything about the bad ones. They get several written warnings before thay ever spend anytime outside and when you finally do send them out, they usually get brought back in with back pay and you can forget about ever getting a really bad one fired permenantly.

 

1) Guy's right. Why should one group not have to pay while the rest do?

2) Unions CAN suck. Doesnt mean they have to. The school districts in the Albany NY "Suburban Council" (Read: Suburban families often with wayy too much money, a garage with a lexus and a BMW, and buying their kids brand new cars for 16th birthdays) have more money than they need. I want to one. Very scary. The administrators have gone so far to compete district to district that one just got a new weight room. This school with 2000 students has better sports facilities than most colleges with less than 10,000 students.... Yet the high school is overcrowded and understaffed. They axe teachers every few years - no matter how long they've been there - to bring in new "cheaper" teachers. I think education is the exception to the rule that unions suck (but there can be bad teachers unions) but when only a couple of our brightest adults want teach, what does that tell us?

3) Union costs on car manufacturers are huge, and with all the work conditions and labor laws in place now, Unions arent as necessary as they once were.

4) Just cause you dont mind the $1000 extra for a "fair shake" it doesnt mean everyone can accept that burden. As was said, many car sales are made or lost on $500, even on a $25,000 automobile. When you can get a loan for $24,500 and not $25,000 - that $500 makes all the difference.

 

<RANT> Second teachers are underpaid. My wife is completing school to be a k-3 elementary teacher. And believe me, if it wasn't for my income - i'd push her to do something that can bring in more money to make ends meet.

Teachers have one of the most important jobs in our social society - yet they are one of the most underpaid as well. Then you have the UAW fighting for a 60k Janitor that can't get off his lazy *** and do anything. I think our society is in for a shock in the next 20 years anybody else concurr???

There is an extraordinary unbalance in the labor market - maybe there always has been??? Oh well - Look at Police officers and Firemen - ALL should be paid WELL over a UAW worker - but are not.
</RANT>

 

Yes -- a lot of people point at one bad union (and they do exist) and say all unions should be abolished. That doesn't make sense. There are bad governments, but that doesn't mean we should abolish the institution of government -- instead, what makes sense is to fix that one bad apple.

The problem with that argument is that laws can be changed at any time, and there's a constant battle between labor and the business lobby to repeal a lot of working protections. Yes, unions have made the US workplace fairly safe and fair, but if they stopped applying that pressure conditions would revert to terrible pretty quickly.

That's like saying "the Republican party is no longer necessary because they've already passed a bunch of laws supporting their platform" (or same for Democrats, whatever). Things are roughly fair because of the balance that's been struck between the two sides constantly fighting each other. The side with more public support wins more often, that's democracy.

 

Yup. Hence " AS necessary" They still are.... just not as much. If they werent around today in this country it wouldnt be as bad as if they vanished 60 years ago... There would be a huge impact and people would get screwed for sure - but not like it used to be...

 

Its supply and demand.

This economy doesn't pay based on "value to society" it pays on scarcity. Why did Michael Jordan make $30m a year his last 3 yrs with the bulls? Not because he had an important job. I'd argue that any teacher is more important socially than a basketball player. However, there's only ONE Michael Jordan. If there were 20 copies of Michael Jordan do you think they'd all have been paid $30m? Look at any high paying job...its paid high because the people qualified for it are rare and the competition is high. There are teachers EVERYWHERE and even in tiny rural towns with no white collar jobs there are teachers bank tellers.

What's more of a rip off is our taxes keep going up and up but teachers continue to be underpaid. Where's all that money going? To hire more mediocre teachers instead of giving raises to the competent ones? I've yet to see any statistical proof that smaller class sizes increase learning.I'd rather have my child in a class of 30 with a great teacher than a class of 15 with a bad one. New Jersey spends $17,000 per year per student. TN spends $8,000. You can't tell me a kid in NJ gets 2x the education, so where's all the money going? For $10,000 per student and a class of 25, anyone out to be able to more than effectively teach the students with $250,000 a year.

With regard to unions, their day has passed. AFL-CIO president Sweeney is embattled because he promised to raise membership and its continued on its 30+ year drop, and will continue to drop because its just not necessary anymore. Unions thrive on an "us v. them" environent and create hostility where none existed before. They reward mediocrity and are generally a drag on the economy. Hey if you don't like what your job pays GO WORK SOMEWHERE ELSE, you are free to find alternate employment, it is America after all.

 

One thing to remember about teachers salaries, though... is that while they may seem low on an annual basis... when you factor that pay on actually time spent working at school, they make out pretty good, IMO.

3 month summer vacations. Earned vacation/personal/sick time on top of that. About 12 holidays a year. Spring Break. Snow days (where applicable)....

That's a lot of time off compared to most other jobs.

 

Teachers spend like 60% of their work day at school. Most teachers spend a lot of time out of the building working on school stuff..... Yes they get a summer break, and yes they get time off.... but look at the responsibility they have and how much work has to go into it. A good friend of mine's father was one of the Calculus teachers at my high school, and he spent hours and hours every night of the week after work prepping for the next day, grading tests and homework, and trying to make notes on how students were doing.

It is a lot of time off, true.

Also, would you want to deal with kids these days? No offense to the younger ones, but with teachers getting sued for even yelling at kids now, they get treated like crap from parents and their brat kids (again, not all like this, but atleast here in Upstate nearly every high schooler has that additude and it's disguesting)