[quote=asianautica]Are you suggesting that UAW worker won’t get social security? Social security is a tax that I paid into. I can’t negotiate with the government as to how much I want from social security. Pension is not like social security, since I don’t have an option to pay less social security tax and get less social security benefits. However, UAW have an option to reduce the pension cost. If anything, you should compare it to 401k. I do consider company match as income. Although the government doesn’t make me report it as income right now, there’s already talk in Washington to remove tax benefits from 401k. That however, is a whole different story.[/quote]
What I’m trying to point out is that the 150k/$73 per hour average “compensation” number is an accounting fiction. Do you really think that a current UAW worker is receiving a 60K salary and 90K in benefits? Do you think 75K is actually being set aside each year, for each employee’s retirement?
The social security example is as close an analogy as I can think of (not that UAW won’t receive social security), since it is a similar issue for non-UAW workers, in that ss & medicare will be massively underfunded in the future, much like the UAW pensions & health benefits are now.
Imagine 30 years from now the average worker makes 60k a year, plus 15k in benefits (and they pay the same percentage for ss/medicare tax as they do today). Their total compensation is 75k. Now assume that SS/medicare are massively underfunded. There are many more retirees then workers, and the current workforce can’t pay the expected benefits to retirees without raising the FICA/medicare taxes to 100% of your income. So the gov’t (the analogy to GM in this case) states that current workforce “makes” 150k in total compensation (75k in direct wages/benefits and another 75k in “benefits” for legacy costs of former workers). Is this future workers compensation really 150k? Assuming the govt funds the 75k legacy shortfall, will the current worker receive that exact amount as a benefit in the future, or just a small fraction of that amount.
