UAW busting, Southern style - Los Angeles Times »
Posted By bruhaha 1 year, 1 month ago in Business & FinanceThe foreign nonunion auto companies located in the South have a plan to reduce wages and benefits at their factories in the United States. And to do it, they need to destroy the United Auto Workers.
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These concessions go some distance toward leveling the playing field (retiree costs are still a factor for the Big Three). But what the foreign car companies want is to level -- which is to say, wipe out -- the union. They currently discourage their workforce from organizing by paying wages comparable to the Big Three's UAW contracts. In fact, Toyota's per-hour wages are actually above UAW wages.
However, an internal Toyota report, leaked to the Detroit Free Press last year, reveals that the company wants to slash $300 million out of its rising labor costs by 2011. The report indicated that Toyota no longer wants to "tie [itself] so closely to the U.S. auto industry." Instead, the company intends to benchmark the prevailing manufacturing wage in the state in which a plant is located. The Free Press reported that in Kentucky, where the company is headquartered, this wage is $12.64 an hour, according to federal labor statistics, less than half Toyota's $30-an-hour wage.
If the companies, with the support of their senators, can wipe out or greatly weaken the UAW, they will be free to implement their plan.
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bruhaha
Geologist at an environmental consulting and engineering company here in the Chicago suburbs.
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Radiofreeeuropa1 year, 1 month ago
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Yes the congressional votes against loans to GM, Ford and Chrysler fell along lines that reflected whether a non union car manufacturer's factory was doing business in their state, not along party lines really. It shows the short sighted thinking and abject selfishness of these people. Busting labor seems to be more important than long term financial stability and national security to these people.
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Radiofreeeuropa1 year, 1 month ago
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Drooling over cheap labor, the technology industry moved to China. How did that work out?
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Yes you have cheapass laptops and LCDs but at the cost of massive unemployment and low consumption, as people now have lower incomes or no incomes to buy these cheap goods.
In retrospect it was a fleecing.
Labor by the way has become an almost insignificant percentage in figuring product costs in many areas...like vehicles for instance.
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