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Originally posted by Vanguard
There is no way to tell what the "market supports".
GM's current fiscal situation disagrees.
Everyone who has been *****ing over the decades about absurd UAW wages and benefits also disagree, me included.
Auto workers do not appear to be "absurdly" overpaid. They are paid a lot more than low skill industrial workers and paid somewhat less than high skill industrial workers. That is not absurd.
The pay and benefits they get is absurd for the kind of work they have to do. I know many people, including family, who work directly for the plants and indirectly. It is safe to say it's an absurdly overcompensated job, due to union extortion. Comeuppance is a *****.
Could GM pay its auto workers less? Probably. But on the other hand Toyota could probably pay its American auto workers more. So why aren't you mad at Toyota?
Why aren't I mad with a company that treats its employees fairly, with respect, all while running a successful business? I'll give you three guesses.
GM does not make ****ty products. People like Silverados. My two Caddies were definitely better than my two Lexuses, which are just Toyotas with really soft leather.
They make ****ty products. Bland designs, poor reliability, derivative marketing, poor fuel efficiency.
FWIW, you and your mindset is a perfect example of part of the problem. You guys are incapable of seeing what makes GM a ticking time bomb, even when it's about to go off. Amazing.
"The issue is there are still many people out there that use religion as a crutch for bigotry and hate. Like Ben."
Ben Kenobi: "That means I'm doing something right. "
His three word argument was excellent. Very well reasoned.
I came upon a barroom full of bad Salon pictures in which men with hats on the backs of their heads were wolfing food from a counter. It was the institution of the "free lunch" I had struck. You paid for a drink and got as much as you wanted to eat. For something less than a rupee a day a man can feed himself sumptuously in San Francisco, even though he be a bankrupt. Remember this if ever you are stranded in these parts. ~ Rudyard Kipling, 1891
Why aren't I mad with a company that treats its employees fairly, with respect, all while running a successful business? I'll give you three guesses.
But Toyota doesn't treat its employees "fairly". It pays them less than it could.
This is just as big a misallocation of capital as union workers extracting "too much" money from car makers. Why shouldn't you be just as upset at the economic harm being done by this?
But Toyota doesn't treat its employees "fairly". It pays them less than it could.
How much will GM pay its workers when it goes out of business compared to how much Toyota pays its workers?
Even what Toyota is paying them right now is too much for what they have to do, IMO.
It's not about how much the company makes, it's about qualifications for the job. If all you do is watch a line and push a button, there's no way you should be getting $30/hr for that kind of work with insane pensions. Just no way.
"The issue is there are still many people out there that use religion as a crutch for bigotry and hate. Like Ben."
Ben Kenobi: "That means I'm doing something right. "
But Toyota doesn't treat its employees "fairly". It pays them less than it could.
This is just as big a misallocation of capital as union workers extracting "too much" money from car makers. Why shouldn't you be just as upset at the economic harm being done by this?
The economic illiteracy inherent in this statement is almost enough to make me cry.
Toyota pays its workers at least the compensation required to get the necessary amount of labour with the necessary skill profile. If it paid its workers "too little" then they wouldn't have enough workers to build the cars they sell.
On the other hand, there is no upper bound to the pay offered by a company. If GM offers much more than the compensation necessary in order to meet its labour needs (as it does) then it simply has to refuse to clear the market. It purchases what it needs from the labour market and then stops. The way it chooses which applicants get jobs is some combination of seniority, high skills and union patronage.
The fact that GM offers an above market-clearing wage implies two things:
1) There is a wealth transfer from equity holders in GM to its employees
2) There is a deadweight loss to the entire economy as GM jobs attract candidates whose skills would be better employed elsewhere (their marginal product would be higher)
Originally posted by One_more_turn
I think Paulson's reluctance to help automakers at this juncture has to do with another, much bigger threat: the impending collapse of Citibank.
...and there it goes.
No, I did not steal that from somebody on Something Awful.
But Toyota doesn't treat its employees "fairly". It pays them less than it could.
This is just as big a misallocation of capital as union workers extracting "too much" money from car makers. Why shouldn't you be just as upset at the economic harm being done by this?
The economic illiteracy inherent in this statement is almost enough to make me cry.
Toyota pays its workers at least the compensation required to get the necessary amount of labour with the necessary skill profile. If it paid its workers "too little" then they wouldn't have enough workers to build the cars they sell.
On the other hand, there is no upper bound to the pay offered by a company. If GM offers much more than the compensation necessary in order to meet its labour needs (as it does) then it simply has to refuse to clear the market. It purchases what it needs from the labour market and then stops. The way it chooses which applicants get jobs is some combination of seniority, high skills and union patronage.
The fact that GM offers an above market-clearing wage implies two things:
1) There is a wealth transfer from equity holders in GM to its employees
2) There is a deadweight loss to the entire economy as GM jobs attract candidates whose skills would be better employed elsewhere (their marginal product would be higher)
If this is your idea of economic reasoning, you should not be calling anyone else a "'****".
So you contend that Toyoto somehow, magically determines the exact minimum amount to pay its workers to get the needed skills, do you?
How exactly do they do this? Competitive bidding? Divinely inspired wage arbitration? Magic 8-ball? The Free Market for Goods and Services?
If the free market has somehow imposed the exactly correct price for labor on Toyota, how come it hasn't done it for GM as well? Have they sinned against the Free Market gods? Not done the proper sacrifices?
GM has been paying the same wages for some years now. If the wages were what is driving them to bankruptcy, how come they weren't bankrupt ten years ago?
Even assuming that Toyota's wages are closer to minimum than GM's are, how do you know that the amount it pays on capital are also the minimum? If paying too much for wages is economically bad, paying "too much" to capital must be equally bad. Mustn't it?
Last edited by Vanguard; November 24, 2008, 14:17.
You might expect it from right-leaning commentators like Will Wilkinson. You wouldn't expect it from someone like Mark Perry, who lives in Flint, Michigan. And you certainly wouldn't expect to see it in the New York Times, from the likes of Andrew Ross Sorkin. But all of them are perpetuating the meme that the average GM worker costs more than $70 an hour, once you include health and pension costs.
It's not true.
The average GM assembly-line worker makes about $28 per hour in wages, and I can assure you that GM is not paying $42 an hour in health insurance and pension plan contributions. Rather, the $70 per hour figure (or $73 an hour, or whatever) is a ridiculous number obtained by adding up GM's total labor, health, and pension costs, and then dividing by the total number of hours worked. In other words, it includes all the healthcare and retirement costs of retired workers.
Now that GM's healthcare obligations are being moved to a UAW-run trust, even that fictitious number is going to fall sharply. But anybody who uses it as a rhetorical device suggesting that US car companies are run inefficiently is being disingenuous. As of 2007, the UAW represented 180,681 members at Chrysler, Ford and General Motors; it also represented 419,621 retired members and 120,723 surviving spouses. If you take the costs associated with 721,025 individuals and then divide those costs by the hours worked by 180,681 individuals, you're going to end up with a very large hourly rate. But it won't mean anything, unless you're trying to be deceptive.
If this is your idea of economic reasoning, you should not be calling anyone else a "'****".
So you contend that Toyoto somehow, magically determines the exact minimum amount to pay its workers to get the needed skills, do you?
How exactly do they do this? Competitive bidding? Divinely inspired wage arbitration? Magic 8-ball? The Free Market for Goods and Services?
If the free market has somehow imposed the exactly correct price for labor on Toyota, how come it hasn't done it for GM as well? Have they sinned against the Free Market gods? Not done the proper sacrifices?
GM has been paying the same wages for some years now. If the wages were what is driving them to bankruptcy, how come they weren't bankrupt ten years ago?
1. How do you define 'fair compensation'? 'As much as they want to be paid' (GM)? 'As much as their labor directly increases value on input' (added value)? 'As much as the market rates for their services' (market)? I'd say fair means they are paid appropriately for their services based on a combination of how much the market determines their services to be worth, and how much they actually contribute to the profitability of the company. It's certainly not 'every last cent of profit', as that's not how things work.
2. GM is not bankrupt because ... they had a lot of extra capital left over, and people were buying crazy numbers of Hummers and similar vehicles in the boom times. They haven't been doing financially well for a bit, though. They aren't paying market prices because of union contracts that are anti-free market... Union contracts have similar effects on labor pricing as monopolies do on goods pricing - GM isn't free to offer a lower (or higher) wage to certain people based on their market 'value'.
<Reverend> IRC is just multiplayer notepad.
I like your SNOOPY POSTER! - While you Wait quote.
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