How Much Do UAW Workers Really Make?

New York Times business columnist David Leonhardt tackles the question today and concludes that the oft-cited figure of $73 per hour is misleading:

The calculations show, accurately enough, that for every hour a unionized worker puts in, one of the Big Three really does spend about $73 on compensation. So the number isn’t made up. But it is the combination of three very different categories.

The first category is simply cash payments, which is what many people imagine when they hear the word “compensation.” It includes wages, overtime and vacation pay, and comes to about $40 an hour. (The numbers vary a bit by company and year. That’s why $73 is sometimes $70 or $77.)

The second category is fringe benefits, like health insurance and pensions. These benefits have real value, even if they don’t show up on a weekly paycheck. At the Big Three, the benefits amount to $15 an hour or so.

Add the two together, and you get the true hourly compensation of Detroit’s unionized work force: roughly $55 an hour. It’s a little more than twice as much as the typical American worker makes, benefits included. The more relevant comparison, though, is probably to Honda’s or Toyota’s (nonunionized) workers. They make in the neighborhood of $45 an hour, and most of the gap stems from their less generous benefits.

The third category is the cost of benefits for retirees. These are essentially fixed costs that have no relation to how many vehicles the companies make. But they are a real cost, so the companies add them into the mix — dividing those costs by the total hours of the current work force, to get a figure of $15 or so — and end up at roughly $70 an hour.

The crucial point, though, is this $15 isn’t mainly a reflection of how generous the retiree benefits are. It’s a reflection of how many retirees there are. [emp. added] 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.

But Heritage analyst James Sherk says this just isn't true:

The hourly benefit figures the Detroit automakers report covers the cost of current and future benefits earned by actively working employees. It does not include the cost of paying health benefits and pensions to current retirees. [emp. added]

To back this up, Sherk points out that:

The Detroit automakers pay similar wages at each company despite having very different numbers of retirees to provide for... General Motors has far more retirees per active worker than Ford or Chrysler. For each active worker at GM, there were 3.8 retirees or dependants in 2006. At Chrysler this ratio was half as much: two retirees for each worker. At Ford there were only 1.6 retirees per worker. If the hourly labor costs included retiree benefits, hourly wages at GM would be much higher than at either Ford or Chrysler.

But this is not the case. General Motors did not have the highest hourly labor costs despite having more retirees. Chrysler paid $2.60 an hour more in labor costs in 2006 than GM did. Ford paid only $2.75 an hour less than GM did, despite having half as many retirees relative to workers to provide for. All three automakers had roughly the same hourly labor costs despite having very different numbers of retirees to provide for. Hourly labor costs account for the expense of providing wages and benefits to current workers but do not include legacy costs.

Sherk makes a strong case, but maybe I'm missing something. Who's right?

It includes wages, overtime and vacation pay, and comes to about $40 an hour.

The current starting salary of a Sanitation Worker is $31,200 per year. The current labor agreement provides for periodic increases to a maximum of $67,141 after 5 1/2 yearsIn addition to the basic annual wages, Sanitation Workers may also earn differential payments based on their specific assignment and overtime.