Detroit auto workers' compensation compared to the rest of us.

 

This slide if from Professor Mark Perry’s blog.  He in the economics and finance department at the University of Michigan.  For more on what bailing out Detroit might really mean, I’ve copied and pasted an article from the Wall Street Journal below.

A bailout might avoid any near-term bankruptcy filing, but it won’t address Detroit’s fundamental problems of making cars that Americans won’t buy and labor contracts that are too rich and inflexible to make them competitive (see chart above of the $25 pay gap between the Big 3 and Toyota/Honda, data here). Detroit’s costs are far too high for their market share. While GM has spent billions of dollars on labor buyouts in recent years, it is still forced by federal mileage standards to churn out small cars that make little or no profit at plants organized by the United Auto Workers.

Rest assured that the politicians don’t want to do a thing about those labor contracts or mileage standards. In their letter, Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Reid recommend such “taxpayer protections” as “limits on executive compensation and equity stakes” that would dilute shareholders. But they never mention the UAW contracts that have done so much to put Detroit on the road to ruin (see chart above). In fact, the main point of any taxpayer rescue seems to be to postpone a day of reckoning on those contracts. That includes even the notorious UAW Jobs Bank that continues to pay workers not to work.

A Detroit bailout would also be unfair to other companies that make cars in the U.S. Yes, those are “foreign” companies in the narrow sense that they are headquartered overseas. But then so was Chrysler before Daimler sold most of the car maker to Cerberus, the private equity fund. Honda, Toyota and the rest employ about 113,000 American auto workers who make nearly four million cars a year in states like Alabama and Tennessee. Unlike Michigan, these states didn’t vote for Mr. Obama.

But the very success of this U.S. auto industry indicates that highly skilled American workers can profitably churn out cars without being organized by the UAW. A bailout for Chrysler would in essence be assisting rich Cerberus investors at the expense of middle-class nonunion auto workers (see chart above). Is this the new “progressive” era we keep reading so much about?

If Uncle Sam buys into Detroit, $50 billion would only be the start of the outlays as taxpayers were obliged to protect their earlier investment in uncompetitive companies.

~From today’s WSJ editorial Nationalizing Detroit