According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average hourly manufacturing wage is roughly $16. Autoworkers for the Big Three, in contrast, earn more than $25 an hour. Who says the UAW doesn't get results? On top of the wages are cushy benefits that mean it costs automakers roughly $65 an hour to employ its workers. The expense of pensions for retired workers - and there are more than twice as many GM retirees as current workers - adds about $2,500 to the price of every car.
There is a high cost to unsustainably high wages and benefits - they tend to destroy the businesses in question.
If an enemy conspirator had infiltrated the U.S. auto industry with the mission of undermining it from within, he couldn't have come up with a worse system.
An example: Big Three autoworkers never quite go away. As part of a union-negotiated ''jobs bank,'' roughly 10,000 of them are each paid $100,000 a year in salary and benefits for not working at all. When a plant closes, workers either have to be transferred to another plant (not more than 50 miles away) or given an expensive early retirement. Otherwise, they stay on the payroll.
It takes some doing to lose nearly $5 billion in a hot auto market, but GM's North American business did it this year. The Big Three can't even compete with automakers on our soil. CNBC's Larry Kudlow calls it the difference between Detroit North and Detroit South. Unencumbered by the legacy costs of the Big Three, free of the drag of unionization, highly flexible and efficient, Japanese and other, smaller foreign car companies are thriving in the South.
As The Wall Street Journal notes, they employ roughly 60,000 workers, make a quarter of all cars in the U.S. and pay good wages. Toyota's North American plants operate at more than 100 percent of their theoretical capacity, GM and Ford at only 86 percent. Efficiency means profit, and profit means expansion. As GM shutters plants, Toyota plans to open a new one in San Antonio.
It would be wrong to put all the blame for the Big Three's troubles on the UAW. Management is responsible for designing unappealing cars and selling them at a loss with "employee discounts." For all its woes, however, Detroit is improving under the pressure of competition, making major efficiency gains in recent years.
The GM announcement has met the usual laments for the death of U.S. manufacturing. By one key measure the sector is actually robust. Manufacturing productivity has been posting strong gains, as manufacturers make ever more products with fewer workers. But we are witnessing the end of a certain kind of manufacturing, the post-World War II model of heavily unionized, lumbering industry as welfare state. U.S. manufacturers need to be faster, leaner, smarter.
This is the future even in Michigan, even in the automotive industry. A new report by a Southeast Michigan group called Automation Alley notes that the more advanced slices of the auto industry are properly thought of as part of the technology sector. It notes that ''the higher-wage, higher-skill jobs in the industry were less likely to be outsourced to lower-cost countries or reduced through internal cost-cutting.'' Instead of bludgeoning management, unions should be working to create a better-educated work force. That is the only path to labor victories that aren't Pyrrhic.
