Monday, July 26, 2010

fun with numbers: autoworker pay edition

The Washington Post tells me that, while auto workers from the pre-bailout era make $28/hour, new hirees are making a government-mandated $14/hr.

Interestingly, although most people who read the Post are probably on salary and think of wages in terms of annual income, the Post never bothers to tell us how it translates.

In case you were wondering, $14/hr. X 8 hrs/day X 5 days/week X 52 weeks/year = $29,120/year. That's factory work (i.e., physically taxing) for guys assumed to be primary breadwinners, 99% of whom according to the article have at least high school degrees. That also means those supposedly hugely overpaid damn union workers were making less than $60k.

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