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https://uaw.org/dues-faq/

Doesn't look like its 5 bucks an hour to me.... Seems like quite a bit less. It took less than a minute to find this.

You are obviously a card-carrying union shill. Unions have outlived their usefullness. We have realized the errors of ways and now have LAWS which prohibit child labor, unsafe working conditions, etc. That shit just wont happen anymore. If you are a union member you are obviously paid more than your education, experience and aptitude should dictate. Unions have inflated wages to an unsustainable level.
Take for example the UAW http://www.uaw.org/node/287 and here http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070924073107AAuGk8O. Average straight wage of a UAW assembler is $27.81 per hour. $54,000 a year to assemble cars? And that doesn't include overtime. That's bullshit. How about $103,000 a year to operate a forklift? Probably with only a high school diploma. WTF?

No wonder you blow a wad in your jeans over unions. You are scared shitless of getting paid what your labor is actually worth.

This is about paying reasonable wages for your labor. Including keeping wages high enough to earn a decent living, and low enough that Im not getting poked in the ass when I buy a car.

I'm certainly not Ebenzeezer but thanks for trying.

Nice antiamerican, antiunion rant there, buddy, but UAW workers work for Toyota. From the supplied link:

The Toyota Corolla, for example, is made in the United States by UAW members, but the Canadian model is made in a nonunion plant and other models are imported from a third country. To be sure you have a union-made vehicle, buy one of the vehicles on this list.

Toyota workers unionized because they were being screwed over by Toyota, which is the only reason to unionize. You can thank unions for the five day work week, paid vacations, eight hour days, and absence of sweatshops.

I'm not in the UAW, but I am a card-carrying member of a labor union. The stockholders of my employer's company bargain collectively, why shouldn't I? The company that bargains with you for a contract has lawyers, and it's not feasable for every employee to hire a lawyer to look over the cotract. With numbers come strength. You alone are no match for an army of stockholders who employ an army of lawyers.

If you have an asshole boss (luckily I have a good boss) you REALLY need a union.

BTW, I'm eligible for a pension in a couple of years, thanks to my union. Anybody who works for a living who is anti-union* is insane.

* Unless they are a member of the Teamsters; that union is worse than useless.

Who in their right mind would say that the union gets credit for a companies PROFITS? If they had certain benefits and then gave them up to help the company, then yes, they deserve to take credit for HELPING the bottom line (and the union should also be wise enough to argue before giving them up to either have stock or that they get a part of the bonus). But otherwise, labor is labor. It is normally management that gets the bulk of the credit. AND to be fair, they almost always take it even if not deserved.

While I make no claim about their soundness of mind, the United Auto Workers, the union representing workers at General Motors, states on their own website that UAW workers deserve a share of the profit -- from their 2007 wage negotiation with GM (at http://www.uaw.org/contracts/07/gm/gm02.php) they say

Profit Sharing
The profit-sharing formula will continue unchanged. Your bargaining team resisted management attempts to put a cap on profit-sharing payouts; UAW GM workers will share fully in any profits that their hard work and sacrifice make possible.

It certainly looks like they are claiming at least a portion of the credit, as well as a portion of the profits. I don't see them scrambling to take a portion of the loss in 2009, though.

Note this is not to excuse GM management, which should be looking for a new job rather than piloting a company they have already ran aground.

Nope. Sorry. That number comes from the total amount in pensions paid out to retirees plus the benefits and hourly wage of the current work force, divided by the number of the current workforce.

If you break it down like a normal person and only counted the people currently working for the UAW, their figures come out within $1/hr of the foreign companies.

Had the foreign companies been in the country as long as the Big Three, they'd be in exactly the same boat. Next time don't just take the FUD passed along by conservative blogs and television as fact without actually looking at where they are pulling these numbers from.

Sorry for the rant, but I am sick and tired of hearing this number thrown about as an excuse to dismantle the UAW. Sure, they have their problems, but this really isn't one of them. If you want to cut pensions for everybody in the country, then take that platform. Otherwise stop complaining about this number and pick a real avenue of attack on unioned labor instead of a fabricated one created by someone bad at math. One of many sources.

Posting AC because I've used mod points in this thread (and not on you)

Do you think it might be that GM makes crap cars nobody wants because they don't have the money for proper development? They make what they know because the Union pensions and asinine wages for people putting bolts on are bleeding the company dry. When someone working an air-wrench makes as much as or more than someone who actually has to think about their job, something is wrong. $27.18/hr is average for a completely unskilled worker at GM. That's a $57844.80 yearly salary. For putting fucking bolts together that any monkey can do.

Unions are very much so the reason that GM is failing. They can't pay a wage that's commensurate with the work that's being done.

Here are views from different sides:

UAW report, from the left.

This report, from a fringe right-wing guy.

This report, from Jim Hightower, also on the left.

Cache of Bob Johnson campaign site, right-winger. Relevant quote: "in dealing with the slave labor camps in Red China, we have to rmember that about 5% of China is in slave labor camps, amounting to 50 million Chinese working"

Indian NGOs site. See part about Chinese slaves making footballs(soccer balls).

Chinese human rights group site

Another Laogai article

Until a president has the balls to say that doctors, hospitals and parms are EXTORTING the American public and make laws to stop them it will not change.

Disclaimer: My wife is a doctor

Okay, let's just take a quick look at some numbers:
From the UAW a UAW represented assembler makes $25.63/hour straight time. This translates to over $53k/year assuming no OT. To my knowledge (quite possible wrong) to obtain this job, you need only a high school diploma. They report post inflation annual raises (from '92-'02) of 1.28%. Average college costs ~$20k (average of public and private, exclude out of state) and is rising by 7% each year. In 1999 med school cost ~$18k (again taking a conservative average), I couldn't find numbers for the annual increase, but given the costs we incurred, 7% is a reasonable number again. Books add even more, to the tune of ~$4k across the first two years. Let's look at a doctor's income stream vs. a UAW assembler assuming they are the high school class of 2003:

First year out of high school, -20k vs. $53k
second, -21.4k vs. $53.7k
third, -22.9k vs. $54.4k
forth, -24.5k vs. $55.1k
Onto medical school we go!
1st year, -25.6k (no inflation for books) vs. 55.8k
2nd year, -27.2k vs. 56.5k
3rd year, -27k (assume no more books) vs. 57.2k
4th year, -28.9k vs. 58.7k
Time for residency, pay based on my wife's:
1st year, 31k vs. 59.5k
2nd year, 31.5k vs. 60.2k
3rd year, 32k vs. 61k

OK, now our doctor is ready to go out and start making real money....where do they stand finacially?

-$83k vs. $567.9k

Most of my wife's medical school friends enter residency with school loan payments to the tune of $1,200/month, basically a second mortgage. So now our doctor gets to go to work. Care to guess how much this doctor is going to get paid for seeing a child on medicaid? $7. Yes, that is right, they will get the princely sum of $7 to see that child for a 15 minute visit. That will probably not cover the cost of the people they must hire to file the paperwork to get paid. That works out to $28/hour while our assembler is now earning $29.48/hour (this is an inflation adjusted number, that means the real number will be much higher since 1% inflation is pretty darn low!). Who was it that was extorting whom? Does that auto worker go to work every day knowing that they could get sued and have everything except their house taken from them (my wife was threatened with lawsuits 3 times as a medical student for Pete's sake! Care to guess how much her malpractice insurance premiums are estimated to be? Over $20k/year.)? Yes, doctors can get paid well, but I would say in many respects they have earned it a lot more than others.

I'm sorry for this rant, but people who just spout off like doctors in general are super greedy really irk me (for obvious reasons). The people you need to be more concerned with are the insurance companies (basically profit generating machines from my perspective) and the lawyers (who make my wife live in constant fear that we will have everything taken away from us someday...oh wait, we get to keep the house and its mortgage).

What people haven't commented on in the Business Week piece is the detail from Scott McNealy's biography -- when he crossed a United Auto Workers picket line during a strike.

According to the article, "One summer, he worked in an auto-parts factory. When the United Auto Workers at the plant went on strike, McNealy didn't think twice about crossing the picket lines -- despite bomb threats and jeers from angry union members. 'It seemed incredibly stupid,' he said. 'I couldn't see how highly paid UAW workers were helping their cause' by losing the company money."

The young Scott McNealy showed the same kind of arrogance, short-sightedness, and contempt for others way back then that he has shown now. That attitude, which led him to scab on fellow workers, is the same attitude that drove a once-great company like Sun into the ground.

Your politicians will do anything for a vote.

Ah, if only.

It has turned out to be simpler to block the people most likely from voting a certain way so they can't vote at all.

The legislators will really do anything for... a campaign contribution.

Unfortunately, most people can be counted upon to vote for the incumbent, or the slate from the same political party with which their parents identified themselves. And patent reform is too esoteric of a subject to capture the interest of most folks.

Democracy was great, in theory...

<grrr>

And that makes you think you should be less cautious? You don't really know WHERE your country is now, do you? Some free clues. Your government is feared and loathed the world over. Your economy is completely fscked - you have to borrow (IIRC) $500 bn [1] every year from the rest of the world to subsidise your absurdly fat lazy lifestyles, which your productivity in no way justifies. Your country, my friend, are fucked. The thing that bothers the rest of us is how badly the American empire will destroy the rest of the world in it's death-throes. Forget the ex-Soviet islamic republics - it's the thought of all those Minuteman silos in Tennessee and Texas that scare me...

Disclaimer: Yes, I have American friends, and I have nothing at all against them as individuals. I am not anti-american.

[1]: http://www.uaw.org/publications/jobs_pay/02/no3/jp e04.html

The minimum wage...now only $5.15...is generally the wage we pay our manufacturing line workers

Ummm, I think that you are mistaken here. what manufacturing lines are you referring to? The UAW certainly makes more than minimum...In fact, according to the UAW they make $29.75 an hour, which is nearly $60k a year assuming the standard 2000 hour year.

I saw another link about GE unionized laborers making $21.45 an hour, but it was a PDF, so I declined to provide the link.

Even when i had a job working as a migrant farm worker in California (yes, I even have my registration card) I was making almost double the minimum wage.

What japanese plants are you talking about in Ohio that are unionized? Honda is the only one I know of that has plants in Ohio (at least 3, one motorcycle, one engine and one car). Considering that the UAW has an article about trying to unionize them on their website, they clearly are not unionized.

I'm guessing the Michigan plant you are thinking of is the Flat Rock Mazda/Ford plant. I googled and couldn't find any mentions of their quality record, though I don't ever remember hearing anyone talk about what great cars the Ford Probe was.

As far as how German and Japanese companies treat their workers in Japan and Germany, that has no bearing on how they teach their workers in their U.S. plants.

Wow I thought the Japanese still worked longer hours, but apparently we're number one now. Much to this guy's chagrin.

Here is a very good article related to this topic:

Congress Can No Longer Ignore Corporate Control of the Media, by U.S. Rep Bernie Sanders

After reading that, if you think you'll see any dissent from the major U.S. purveyors of knowledge, you're wrong..

Check out the United Auto Workers website . Average salary is $14 an hour.

I think it's great that employees are getting computers and net access, but we should not loose sight of the fact that Ford did not do this out of the kindness of it's heart - it was part of their latest negotiation with the United Auto Workers!

Not sure if I'm the first to point this out, and I think it's great that employees are getting computers and net access, but we should not loose sight of the fact that Ford did not do this out of the kindness of it's heart - it was part of their latest negotiation with the United Auto Workers!

Ford CEO Jac Nasser currently communicates with Ford's white-collar employees via a weekly e-mail newsletter. Putting computers in the homes of all Ford employees would allow him to access the automaker's entire work force via the Internet, even those employees who do not have desks because they work on assembly lines.

Looked at from a historical perspective, this deal could represent a major social revolution. It appears that Ford will be the first major company to offer all of its employees home computers at no cost. It was also the company that pioneered the five dollar day. This dramatically boosted workers take home pay in the early 1900s and allowed assembly line workers to afford the Model Ts that they produced.

This does not even consider the goodwill that the company and the union will engender in the workforce by providing a free computer for use in every employee's home. Think of the educational possibilities for the children of each Ford employee.

What would happen if a benefit like this were available to the employees of other large companies?
--

Dave Aiello