One of the favorite tactics of the anti-worker anti-union mainstream media is to vastly inflate the actual wages of union workers in their news coverage.
That's why whenever you read about, just as an example, the UAW needing to rein in their expectations you'll see all sorts of fanciful numbers being tossed about how labor costs are $54 per hour, or $60, or $70.
The alchemists who conjure up these numbers throw in all sorts of superfluous health care costs and pension obligations to come up with those figures, when in reality the actual UAW member on the shop floor might be making $28 if he's been there for twenty years, and $14 if he's a recent hire.
Here's a timely example from today's Washington Post. We're told that east coast dockworkers are already "well compensated with an average salary of $124,000 a year."
Well by golly, that does sound like well-compensated. Let's see, that works out to roughly $60 per hour assuming the dockworker is working an average of 40 hours a week; what's typically considered full-time employment.
According to the last contract signed with the International Longshoreman's Association, the top rate at the end of the contract was $32 an hour, not $60, with recent hires making substantially less. (Sadly, even the ILA has caved to employer demands and accepted two-tier wage structures.)
While it's possible that there's a dockworker here or there at the top end of the seniority list, pigging out on OT, who is in the range of that "average" presented by the Post, the vast majority are a long way south of that. It can take years before a new hire even gets 40 hours a week.
We all know the reason for this kind of sleazy "reporting"; it makes the union folks look greedy and the employers look hard done by.
As such it's nothing less and nothing more than anti-union propaganda.
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