UAW reportedly agrees to 17.5% stake in GM
Facing a looming June 1 deadline to reach agreements with the bondholders and union, General Motors may have failed to come to terms with the former, but it has reportedly arrived at a tentative concessions agreement with latter. The deal puts the United Auto Workers' trust fund in charge of future health care costs in exchange for a 17.5% stake in the reorganized General Motors. The U.S. Treasury is still expected to take the controlling stake in the reorganized company.In addition, the agreement calls for GM to put $10 billion in assets in the UAW's Voluntary Employee Beneficiary Association (VEBA) and to issue the union a $2.5 billion note to be payed in three installations in 2013, 2015, and 2017. With less than one week to go before a likely Chapter 11 bankruptcy, GM remains in survival mode.
[Source: Automotive News - Sub. Req.]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
HCL3 9:43AM (5/27/2009)
They should be getting 0% for the part they played in running GM into the ground. Too bad nobody in Washington or Detroit has the balls to stand up to these thugs.
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Sea Urchin 10:50AM (5/27/2009)
Too bad you have no guts to admit that it really was the management that ruined the company.
You remember Wagoner, Aztek, Cobalt, Lutz?
HCL3 11:00AM (5/27/2009)
Management is to blame for being scared to death of standing up to the UAW thugs.... the UAW is to blame for 70+ years of expecting more and more money for less and less work
GOKARTN 10:11AM (5/27/2009)
New meaning to the phrase "you break it, you buy it"
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From My Cube 10:22AM (5/27/2009)
no its more like, im uncomforatable, lets make GM pay my medical bills since i dencided to work a factory job...while there at it, give me a raise, i dont make enough for not having a college degree...
still pisses me off that i busted my butt for four years to get a degree in accounting and some people working line jobs make more than i do....*goes back to filling out grad school etrance questionaires*
Dude 9:54AM (5/27/2009)
Obama! Rewarding failure and campaign contributors since November 2008.
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Mr.Oak 11:47AM (5/27/2009)
You're an idiot.
knightuc1992 1:13PM (5/27/2009)
The same can be said for every administration since the 1929...
Todd 9:59AM (5/27/2009)
"Employee owned", as it pertains to quality assurances for the Consumer, just became meaningless.
...so who are the union workers going to lash out at now? What will happen to that blue collar battle cry "I don't care, I'm just stickin' it to The Man"? - They are "The Man" now.
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BoxerFanatic 10:17AM (5/27/2009)
They don't want that.
They are saying so with Chrysler. They want to sell off their stake, to fund VEBA.
They can't abide with having no enemy, and having to self-evaluate. A union would have no idea how to do that. They still want "the Man" to rail against.
They'll probably do the same thing with GM.
JZeke 10:20AM (5/27/2009)
I can't imagine this will be a good thing for the product developers.
I understand the labor component is crucial for making the car, but unless there are some very strict communication guidelines in place plants calling R&D shots almost always leads to crappy products. You just can't have labor telling design and engineering what to do, its not something they understand.
I worked in one company where the factories had taken a lot of control from R&D and were calling product development shots. They were nixing new ideas because they were "too hard to manufacture" - clearly not giving a crap about innovation and new product excitement.
One example: I was tasked to introduce new finishes to dash panels, as marketing feedback said customers were tired of the same finishes they had been seeing for over a decade. The piano black we introduces for certain models was initially nixed by a couple plants because their workers kept scratching the pieces during installation. So instead of telling us, and working to figure out a new way to assemble it - they just axed it.
Design won the fight, and consumers were happy... but there never should've been a fight to begin with.
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dukeisduke 10:29AM (5/27/2009)
I can't blame the bondholders for refusing to be voluntarily screwed. Obama has made a mockery of the bankruptcy laws.
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PlushLimbaugh 10:56AM (5/27/2009)
"Frommycube", you must be a pretty lousy accountant if these line workers are making more than you. That and of course, accounting is far more comfortable work than any hard labor would be. Or do you honestly believe the boldfaced lie that they make $70 an hour.
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Scot 11:15AM (5/27/2009)
He said some... I have seen unemployment for some of these line workers and the highest paid one I saw made $83/hour. Makes me glad I went to college... not.
montoym 1:27PM (5/27/2009)
It's not a lie, just people confused by the context.
The $70/hr figure includes all compensation, not purely the employees actual pay. It's really quite simple.
Including benefits, holiday pay, healthcare, overtime, legacy costs, etc. I can easily see it being $70/hr and have no reason to doubt the figure. Their actual starting wage is $28+/hr(according to the most recent labor contract). That $28/hr adds up to roughly $58K/yr purely assuming 40hrs/wk and 52wks/yr.
Either way, that's more than double the median income(half make more, half make less) of all US workers which stands at $26,036 as of 2006, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States
No matter how you want to characterize it, they have very well-paying jobs, at least much better than the majority of Americans.
At my current job, my total compensation is a fair amount more than I make as well(my employer pays a large majority of my healthcare premium). I've also had a fair amount of overtime and other extra pay this year so far. It would be even more if I were more vested in the 401k as well, but I haven't been here long enough yet so it's mostly all self-funded.
If they chose to state my total compensation as opposed to my actual pay, I wouldn't call that a lie, but it would need to be stated as total compensation. That's a term I do see the large majority of the time when mentioning the UAW payscales. It would also be wholly accurate as that's what it costs my employer to keep me employed, what I actually take home is important only to me really.
It may be confusing to those who don't understand it(or refuse to learn about it), but to call it a lie is being quite liberal with the facts.
montoym 1:44PM (5/27/2009)
To be a bit more accurate, I re-read the wikipedia link I posted and decided to add a bit more. I was rushing through it originally since I actually do have other work to do today.
The per capita income I posted from the wiki link does include all persons over the age of 14 whether they work or not to determine the median income. That makes for a lower figure than what would be if only those who actually work are used.
Thankfully, the same link includes that info as well, though not as concise.
They do include the median income for men who work full-time($45,113) and for women who work full-time($35,102), but not total. The average of those two figures is $40,107. That's likely not a completley accurate figure, but still works in this case.
Nonetheless, it doesn't change my statements above greatly other than the starting wage of a UAW production worker is still higher than the median wage of the majority of Americans, though not more than double as I stated origianlly. Depends on how you wish to look at the data.
Just thought I'd be thorough since I know someone would point that out and make an assumption without actually checking on the facts(that never happens right?).
elprogramer 3:19PM (5/27/2009)
The starting wage is emphatically not $28/hr. When I hired in, it was $18/hr and the latest few contracts have lowered that by four or eight dollars.
montoym 4:30AM (5/28/2009)
Numerous links and stories place the wages around $28/hr or higher. I'm sorry that your job wasn't one of those, but they are certainly there.
montoym 1:36PM (5/28/2009)
Feel free to read the UAW-GM agreement. The pdf file of the agreement can be found from this AB link. http://www.autoblog.com/2007/09/30/in-case-you-were-interested-the-unabridged-official-uaw-gm-cont/
New Agreement Base - $28.12/hr for an Assembler and $32.83/hr for Tool & Die.
That's a little more than $2.00/hr more for both compared to the previous base pay listed at the top. Not a decrease of $4-8/hr as you stated.
I think what you're thinking of are the entry-level, "non-core" jobs that were added in that start at $14/hr. That's all in the link I posted as well. Those jobs are not related to actual vehicle production and estimates I've seen place those jobs at a maximum of 20% of the workforce. Also, if those workers get hired on to other "core" jobs, they will take on the pay scale of the core job.
If you have other links to dispute this, please feel free to post them. That works much better than stating that since what you were paid was less, that your info is correct.
There are also numerous stories of non-union autoworkers being paid $25+/hr as well and the UAW strongly pulls for wages equal to their non-union counterparts. I don't think a $15/hr job would satisfy that much.
Here's an AB link stating that non-union Toyota workers earn about $30/hr in wages and bonuses, http://www.autoblog.com/2009/01/22/gettelfinger-wage-cuts-wont-be-part-of-uaw-concessions/ Also reiterated in that link is the fact that UAW workers do in fact earn roughly $28/hr. and that they also did not decrease the wages either.
There's another part of the UAW-GM contract link which states that the workers will receive 32hrs of shutdown pay for the week of Independence Day. They state that for the typical GM Assembler, that equates to $950. Doing the math, $950/32hrs = $29.69/hr.
Also, they list that for the 4yrs which the contract covers, the UAW workers will recieve 68 paid holidays including the week between Christmas and New Year's(page 22 of the pdf). That's 17 paid holidays per year. Short of being a schoolteacher(or maybe a banker), that's the most days off I can think of for a job, paid no less.
harlanx6 11:37AM (5/27/2009)
The longer this takes, the worse it's going to be. When you are broke, you have to take action, and all the entanglements can only be untangled by the courts.
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