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top UAW members' wage is $28 per hour.
average GM worker's pay is $39.68 per hour, including base pay, overtime, shift differential, vacation pay, etc. http://www.media.gm.com/manufacturing/handbook/other_benefits.pdf that works out to 64K per year.
where does the bogus 150K/90K number come from? republican fuzzy math. Total labor costs per hour are that $39.68 plus "$33.58 in benefits for each active hour worked" http://www.media.gm.com/manufacturing/handbook/other_benefits.pdf (which is still less than $120k per year, of course)
breaking down that $33.58:
first: legally required benefits like SS, medicare, unemployment, workmans' comp, etc.
second: other benefits; healthcare, pension, disability, etc.
third: payments to retired workers for pensions and healthcare.
note that third item: payments to RETIRED workers. even for a republican it's hard to claim that payments to thousands of folks who were working 20 years ago constitute pay to a much smaller number workers who are currently working. if you wanted to, you could calculate what the annual compensation for those retired workers was, including their current payments, but that's not what's being argued.
GM et al never said they were paying $73 an hour to current employees. They said, their total labor costs were $73 an hour currently worked. "The new cost includes laborers' wages of $29.78 per hour, plus benefits, pensions and the cost of providing health care to more than 432,000 GM retirees, GM spokesman Tony Sapienza said." http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/081119/fact_check_autos_labor_costs.html?.v=1
when you exclude those payments to retirees from current wages and benefits, in fact the difference in total compensation between UAW workers and nonunion workers at Toyota or Honda in the south ends up being only a couple bucks an hour.
of course, to a diehard republican, it makes total sense to financially penalize current blue collar workers for payments to former employees, contracted to by the employer. whereas, of course, to cover the retirees' healthcare and pension from federal taxes, would be socialist redistribution of wealth, etc. etc. etc.
