Re: [Pen-l] CounterPunch, the most widely read radical website in the English...

[Waistline2@xxxxxxx]

 
Jim Devine wrote:

> The New York Times / December 10, 2008
> By DAVID LEONHARDT
> ...It's a reflection of how many
> retirees there are. The Big Three built up a huge pool of retirees
> long before Honda and Toyota opened plants in this country. You'd
> never know this by looking at the graphic behind Wolf Blitzer on CNN
> last week, contrasting the "$73/hour" pay of Detroit's workers with
> the "up to $48/hour" pay of workers at the Japanese companies.
> These retirees make up arguably Detroit's best case for a bailout. The
> Big Three and the U.A.W. had the bad luck of helping to create the
> middle class in a country where individual companies â as opposed to
> all of society â must shoulder much of the burden of paying for
> retirement...
>  

<< Actually, the 'bad luck' was part of a top-down business-government
class-war strategy, was it not, to avoid a social welfare state and
increase the bargaining power of capital versus labor in the 1940s?
That's the way Vicente Navarro explains the hostility to national health
insurance, and I assume the same goes for pensions. >> (end)

 

Comment

 

Public opinion has sifted from 60% of ordinary American being against the auto bridge loans to 46% favoring such a loan package and 42% opposing it. At any rate . . . .

 

Pensions come out of the pension fund, which is to say X number of dollars do not come out of each vehicle sold to pay current pension obligations.  The level of funding of the pension fund is governed by Federal laws. Toyota of course has pension cost as does Nissan and Germany's Daimler. Toyota, Nissan, Honda and Daimler have health care cost here in the United States, although these cost may not be as high as the cost of Northern-unionized labor.

 

I hope it is understood that the pension funds are the next area of attack of capital. The gamblers - speculators, want access to these pools of money, which have taken a big hit with the downturn in financial markers. There is no light at the end of the tunnel, only more tunnel.

 

Yesterday on television - Larry Neval program, a vice president for Chrysler when confronted with the "unrealistic labor cost of the American producers" ($73) stated that Chrysler labor cost is only 7% of the cost of vehicle production. Generally, the auto executives do not respond to such figures because they are more often than not divorced from reality or "how things really work." Throughout the last hearing on the hill, every single representative for the Big Three has stated that labor cost is below 10% of total cost from creation to sale of vehicles. Determining what is realistic cost would be a historical measure of what portion of labor goes into total cost in the auto industry. Such a measure works run from roughly 1905 to 2008.

 

Whatever the actual figure between the major six producers, labor cost is not a drag on profits or the reason for the current cycle of un-profitability of the Big Six.

 

Labor cost is less than 10% of total cost.

 

The fixed cost in auto is of course heavy and the density of machinery - advanced robotics, is increasing, replacing labor forever. It is not like one can simply shut down a plant. Many systems have to stay running in "shut down mode," in the same sense that one cannot just shut down a steel furnace and then start it up when the market picks up.  

 

The reason the auto industry spokesperson do not advocate slashing labor cost is because this will in no ways solve the problem of even help solve the problem. Slashing labor cost from 7% to 4% will not solve the problem of shrunken production, market contraction and increasing density of machinery .

 

 

Waistline

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