Originally posted  2008-11-30 20:27:32 -0500. Bumped up by Carol. I think Standingup has raised an extremely important concern. If the conservatives are successful in deflecting the auto bailout to a union-busting campaign this will seriously undermine the hopes for a New Deal style recovery, and IMO any economic recovery.

We heard the outcry over the CEO's of the big three automakers flying into D.C. aboard their private jets to beg Congress for a little of the bailout money.  Next we were told the American automakers can't compete with the foreign automakers because the union wages are bleeding them dry.  The pro-business anti-union chiefs saw the crisis as another opportunity to push their propaganda to break up the unions.  Of course they found more than a few in the media willing to help them in their campaign.  Fortunately there are still some folks around that don't believe everything they read and hear from the press.   

I have the pleasure of providing you with links to some of the few with the wisdom to question what was being said.

Eric Boehlert, writing at Media Matters, takes the press to task:

As I mentioned, it's been one week since the column appeared, which seems like plenty of time for Sorkin and the Times to correct the misleading $70-an-hour claim. But to date, there's been no clarification from the newspaper of record or from Sorkin himself.

And he isn't alone. Appearing on NPR last week, Times senior business correspondent Micheline Maynard told listeners that the "hourly wage" of Detroit's union autoworkers had been driven up "towards $80 an hour."

Somebody at the Times needs to clarify the record, because the average United Auto Workers member is not paid $80 an hour. Or even $70. Not even close. Yet (thanks to the Times?) the issue has become a central talking point in the unfolding national debate about the future of America's automotive industry.

Indeed, that $70-an-hour meme, actively promoted by the anti-union conservative media, has ricocheted around the traditional press as well as the political landscape, where it was picked up by congressional critics last week during hearings and used to argue against aiding GM, Ford, and Chrysler.

Next we have Felix Salmon at CONDÉ NAST PORTFOLIO:

...But all of them are perpetuating the meme that the average GM worker costs more than $70 an hour, once you include health and pension costs.

It's not true.

The average GM assembly-line worker makes about $28 per hour in wages, and I can assure you that GM is not paying $42 an hour in health insurance and pension plan contributions. Rather, the $70 per hour figure (or $73 an hour, or whatever) is a ridiculous number obtained by adding up GM's total labor, health, and pension costs, and then dividing by the total number of hours worked. In other words, it includes all the healthcare and retirement costs of retired workers.

And we will wrap it up with Jonathan Cohn at The New Republic:

More important, and contrary to what you may have heard, the wages aren't that much bigger than what Honda, Toyota, and other foreign manufacturers pay employees in their U.S. factories. While we can't be sure precisely how much those workers make, because the companies don't make the information public, the best estimates suggests the corresponding 2007 figure for these "transplants"--as the foreign-owned factories are known--was somewhere between $20 and $26 per hour, and most likely around $24 or $25. That would put average worker's annual salary at $52,000 a year.

So the "wage gap," per se, has been a lot smaller than you've heard. And this is no accident. If the transplants paid their employees far less than what the Big Three pay their unionized workers, the United Auto Workers would have a much better shot of organizing the transplants' factories. Those factories remain non-unionized and management very much wants to keep it that way.

Take a moment when you have one free to read the pieces in their entirety.  These little tidbits of information could come in handy if the topic comes up at the upcoming holiday gatherings and office parties.