the $73 dollar an hour myth: NY Times article:

[amborin]

<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/10/business/economy/10leonhardt.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=73%20hour%20&st=cse>

<snip>

"Add the two together, and you get the true hourly compensation of Detroit’s unionized work force: roughly $55 an hour.

It’s a little more than twice as much as the typical American worker makes, benefits included. The more relevant comparison, though, is probably to Honda’s or Toyota’s (nonunionized) workers. They make in the neighborhood of $45 an hour, and most of the gap stems from their less generous benefits.

The third category is the cost of benefits for retirees. These are essentially fixed costs that have no relation to how many vehicles the companies make. But they are a real cost, so the companies add them into the mix — dividing those costs by the total hours of the current work force, to get a figure of $15 or so — and end up at roughly $70 an hour. ....

The crucial point, though, is this $15 isn’t mainly a reflection of how generous the retiree benefits are. It’s a reflection of how many retirees there are. The Big Three built up a huge pool of retirees long before Honda and Toyota opened plants in this country. You’d never know this by looking at the graphic behind Wolf Blitzer on CNN last week, contrasting the “$73/hour” pay of Detroit’s workers with the “up to $48/hour” pay of workers at the Japanese companies."

<snip>

The UAW fought long and hard for workers' benefits.

They fought hard for the 1950 Treaty of Detroit, which won auto workers the right to a pension, before that they received none.

Today, the foreign transplants still do not pay their workers a pension.

And they use every legal and illegal tactic to keep their plants unorganized.

[David__77]

1. It's a demographic issue as much as anything else.

So many retirees.