"flipper" wrote in message
...
It's not a trivial amount either. If we take UAW 2007 numbers, which
serves the double duty of illustrating benefits as well as the
'problem' with unions, the 'average' UAW worker makes $28 an hour.
Including base pay, cost-of-living adjustments, night-shift premiums,
overtime, holiday and vacation pay it comes to $39.68 an hour.
Health-care, pension and other benefits average another $33.58 an
hour.

Gee, and here I thought it was only those government employees who had the
gold-plated health care and pension plans! :-)

I'm a big advocate of having employment offers disclose the total compensation
value of a position, since a lot of people sorely underestimate how much all
those benefits cost their employers. It might even help the problem with
heatlh care cost inflation if most everyone was aware that, their employee
paid, e.g., $1k+ per month to insure them and their family (even if the
employee is already paying a chunk of that).

They weren't kidding either because, as defined by the, as of 2007,
United Auto Worker contract negotiated with the "Big Five" (GM, Ford,
Chrysler, and top parts makers Delphi and Visteon), an auto
"production worker" is a job description that covers anything from
mowing grass to cleaning the toilets

I wouldn't be surprised if many of the production lines jobs didn't really
require that many more skills than mowing grass does...

But at least they were doing something. The UAW contract also
guaranteed that 12,000 autoworkers got full wage for doing nothing.
The Detroit News reported that "12,000 American autoworkers, instead
of bending sheet metal, spend their days counting the hours in a jobs
bank." These aren't jobs and they certainly aren't being "lost" to
China. "We just go in (to Ford's Michigan Truck Plant) and play
crossword puzzles, watch videos that someone brings in or read the
newspaper," The News quoted one UAW worker as saying. "Otherwise, I've
just sat."

The sad part here is that, if for whatever reason you end up with a job that
literally lets you sit around doing nothing all day, why aren't you actually
doing something to improve your skills at *producing something* (even if it's
not cars -- go and study iPad app programming or whatever!) rather than just
playing games all day?

I knew a few guys in college who had this figured out -- purposely taking the
graveyard shift at 24-hour gas stations or convenience stores, where it was
allowed that when customers weren't around, they could instead do their
homework.

---Joel