"Wages for UAW members at Chrysler, Ford and GM range from about $14 an hour for newly hired workers to $28 an hour for assemblers to $33 for skilled trades workers.

Typical hourly wages at Honda, Nissan and Toyota are only slightly lower. Due to the effect of profit-sharing formulas, however, there have been some recent years in which a typical Toyota worker has taken home a larger annual paycheck than a typical GM worker.

The $73 an hour figure is outdated and inaccurate. It includes not only the costs of health care, pensions, and other compensation for current workers, but also the costs of the pensions and health care benefits of retired employees spread out over the active workers. Active workers never receive any of this compensation in any form, so it is not accurate to describe it as part of their 'earnings.'"

Dec. 2, 2008 - United Auto Workers (UAW) 

"Labor cost per hour, wages and benefits for hourly workers, 2006. Ford: $70.51 ($141,020 per year) GM: $73.26 ($146,520 per year) Chrysler: $75.86 ($151,720 per year) Toyota, Honda, Nissan (in U.S.): $48.00 ($96,000 per year) According to AAUP [American Association of University Professors] and IES [Institute of Education Sciences], the average annual compensation for a college professor in 2006 was $92,973 (average salary nationally of $73,207 + 27% benefits). Bottom Line: The average UAW worker with a high school degree earns 57.6% more compensation than the average university professor with a Ph.D. (see graph above, click to enlarge), and 52.6% more than the average worker at Toyota, Honda or Nissan."

July 11, 2007 - Mark J. Perry, MBA, PhD 

"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."

Dec. 9, 2008 - David Leonhardt