The $70 per hour US autoworker is a myth: "average wages for workers at Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors were just $28 per hour as of 2007." And the actual wage gap between the Big Three (GM, Ford, and Chrysler) and their Japanese competitors isn't actually that significant. So where did the 7-0 figure come from?
Analysts came up with it by including the cost of all employer-provided benefits--namely, health insurance and pensions--and then dividing by the number of workers. The result, they found, was that benefits for Big Three cost about $42 per hour, per employee. Add that to the wages--again, $28 per hour--and you get the $70 figure. Voila.Except ... notice something weird about this calculation? It's not as if each active worker is getting health benefits and pensions worth $42 per hour. That would come to nearly twice his or her wages. (Talk about gold-plated coverage!) Instead, each active worker is getting benefits equal only to a fraction of that--probably around $10 per hour, according to estimates from the International Motor Vehicle Program. The number only gets to $70 an hour if you include the cost of benefits for retirees--in other words, the cost of benefits for other people.
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How the Wall Street mighty have fallen and this absurd photograph of a Lehman employee leaving the office with his novelty battle axe seems to embody in someway the pillage the village attitude that ultimately left the financial industry's flanks vulnerable. Although it is still pretty bad ass to have a battle axe at your office. I want one.