UAW reaches tentative agreement with Ford to end strike
Business InsiderOCT 2023
This agreement is more than generous, given that the UAW's original demand of 40% would have doubled Ford's labor costs and crushed their competition with foreign companies. While it's true that workers deserve fair pay while their bosses make millions of dollars, it's wrong to make a direct comparison between the thousands of factory workers and the far smaller number of executives. If GM's CEO were to give her entire $29M salary to every worker, for example, it would only add pennies to each rank-and-file worker's paycheck.
Dividing a CEO's million-dollar salary by the number of employees is a nice gimmick, but it doesn't touch the heart of the issue at hand. The truth is that these three car companies made a combined $21B in profit in just the first half of this year. Meanwhile, first-time workers would likely have to be paid $25 per hour to have the same buying power that less than $10 dollars did in the early 1990s. While an agreement is good news, it shouldn't be forgotten that, given the impact of inflation in recent years, the UAW's original demand was actually quite fair.