Wait..average Ford employee makes more than $55 an hour?

[Denny Crane]

Sure. The money also goes taxpayer => govt => bailout => automaker => union workers => porn.

So we are bailing out the porn industry.

barfo

If you want to question the CEO's pay, then you might want to question the union workers' pay. Sure, the CEO might make $50M, but add up $55/hr * 100,000 workers.

 

[BrianFromWA]

Oooh, me! $5.5M per hour. Generally you go by the 2080 hr/yr rule for determining a man-year (including vacation, sick day, training, etc). So $11.44B/yr.

I can do arithmetic. But I can't rivet. Yet.

 

[Ed O]

I believe unions saved this country from communism at the beginning of the 20th Century. However, like the buggy whip, they're an anachronism. The government has basically replaced the unions in protecting workers' rights. The stuff unions protest against would be laughed at by the people who tried to form them in the late 19th Century.

I agree... unions did save the country from communism. They also improved social and working conditions for employees and filled an important "safety net" role to ensure that the country didn't go too far, too fast.

That safety net is now being provided by the government (for better or worse) and the expectations and economics created by many unions are simply unsustainable today. They're going to go down, and they're going to go down hard.

Or are they? Unions vote individually and they can act collectively in influencing the government. In a voting nation of taxpayers, handouts could be checked by majority rule. At the rate we're going, fewer than 50% of citizens will pay taxes, and ... they might as well vote for shit they're not paying anything towards.

Ed O.