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Recently, with news of the automaker crisis, a lie has been floated about how much UAW members are making at the Big Three U.S. automakers. If you’ve heard or read these claims, you may fall into the belief that our fellow union members at U.S. auto plants receive compensation equaling $70 per hour. Don’t fall for it.

Even if you understand that $70 refers to more than just hourly wages, you might still have a completely false idea stuck in your head. The number being put out by those spreading the $70/hour lie refers to a strange formula based on total compensation figures.

The formula in question fails for one huge reason: the per hour cost for current union autoworkers is arrived at by adding benefit costs for retired union autoworkers as well. Using the same distorted math, someone could probably tell the same lie about UPS Teamsters. After all, our complete benefits package over the years is comparable in every way to what UAW members have been getting, and if you add in all UPS compensation/benefit costs (including hundreds of thousands of retirees) and only divide by the number of active employees, you’ll get a similarly huge distortion. So, if UAW members at GM, Ford and Chrysler are getting $70 an hour in total compensation, we probably aren’t far behind. But any Teamster working at UPS knows we don’t cost the company anywhere near that much.

If you’ve read this far, you should understand how utterly untrue the $70 per hour myth is. And if you understand that much, you might be wondering who would be starting such a misleading rumor.

Simply put, the rumor was started by people who exist to tear down unions and the gains unions have made on behalf of workers. And the path they’ve envisioned to tearing down unions goes right through Detroit, where they believe the failure (or restructuring) of the major American automakers will result in the collapse of the United Auto Workers union.

The rationale they like to offer is that, if the auto industry can vaporize the union, they can lower total compensation costs to more closely resemble those of foreign automakers employing workers in the U.S. (whose costs they estimate in the range of 40-50 dollars per hour). The problem with this rationale is that UAW members at the U.S.-owned auto plants are already closer to that compensation level than union bashers spreading these lies would have us believe. In fact, the most recent UAW contract with GM has drastically reduced GM’s liability for both retirees and active workers (a fact that has many in the UAW more than a little bothered), something the people behind the $70 per hour lie also fail to account for.

But the real danger is in allowing the anti-union dream scenario to become reality. If the union presence disappears or even decreases noticeably, all autoworkers, union or not, will see their compensation drop by a lot.

Remember when I mentioned that the anti-unionists want to erase “the gains unions have made on behalf of workers”? I didn’t say “union workers,” because I wasn’t just referring to union workers. I was referring to workers in any industry with a union presence.

Like the people at Fedex, who get just that much more in pay because UPS is unionized. Then there are the folks working for Toyota, Honda or the other foreign automakers with non-union plants in this country. You see, in both cases, non-union employers offer as much as they do because the unionized companies set a benchmark for industry compensation. Failing to offer compensation that appears close to the benchmark would make non-union plants easier targets for union organizing. And if the unions disappear, so does the benchmark — allowing non-union compensation to drift as low as management desires.

When unions are driven out of industries, those industries inevitably go minimum wage (think of meat processors, cutters and others in the meatpacking industry). And more minimum wage jobs are not what this economy needs.

But it’s probably just what the people telling the $70 an hour lie want.

Pay attention, because while it may be U.S. autoworkers under attack today, it will be others tomorrow. Someday, it will be UPS Teamsters getting smeared by some extravagant lie about how much more money they make compared to the average non-union worker. Don’t believe it? If you remember all the news reports from August, 1997, you know it’s already happened.

While Teamsters walked picket lines at UPS, there were voices on the news telling the American public that UPS workers make too much, have benefits that are too good, and so on. As UPS Teamsters know, we don’t receive exorbitant salaries or benefit packages, but that was the lie the anti-unionists were pushing.

Thankfully, the lie failed then. It failed because the union and others who were sympathetic to the workers’ cause beat it back. It will only fail again if the UAW and all the sympathetic voices they can find stand up and let people know it’s just another lie.

We need to join that sympathetic chorus and keep this lie from gathering steam. We can let our friends, family and government representatives know it’s a lie. We can make calls, send emails and letters to Congress. Tell them not to put automakers in a position to steal back hard-won rights from UAW members, or to eliminate the benchmark they’ve won for non-union autoworkers.

Again, it’s about solidarity. And again, it’s going to take an effort from everyone who understands what’s really at stake. You can start sending a message to your governmental representatives by clicking here.

Related links:

• Joe the Autoworker.com
• stories labeled ‘UAW’ at Joe’s Union Review
• ‘Debunking the myth of the $70-per-hour autoworker’ at The New Republic
• ‘Hands Off the UAW’ at The Nation

Filed under: exposing anti-union propoganda, jobs, politics, poverty and wealth, rights, solidarity, unionism