General Motors and Chrysler, which went hat-in-hand to Washington begging for bailouts, are getting ready to cut big, fat bonus checks to their salaried employees. Some of them may add up to 50% of their annual salaries.
Bloomberg.com has details of yet another taxpayer-funded rip-off in Motor City:
GM plans to pay bonuses to most managers equal to 15 percent to 20 percent of their annual salary and as high as 50 percent to less than 1 percent of its 26,000 U.S. salaried employees, said one of the people, who asked not to be named revealing internal plans. Bonuses for Chrysler’s 10,755 salaried workers will average about $10,000, with a small group getting as much as half of their salary, one of the people said.
The payouts come as GM, Chrysler and Ford Motor Co. prepare for contract talks this year with the United Auto Workers, which is seeking a share of the industry’s growing prosperity. Ford, the only U.S. automaker to avoid bankruptcy in 2009, is expected to pay bonuses equal to 10 percent or more of base pay to some salaried staff, said a person familiar with the plan.
“The union is going to be very angry about this,” Gary Chaison, a professor of industrial relations at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, said in an interview yesterday. “If these kinds of bonuses are paid to salaried workers, then the union’s demands will increase, knowing management can’t claim an inability to pay.”
The unions are going to be angry? Screw the unions. As a result of the bailouts, they now own the damn companies. Their cushy pension plans and generous medical plans remain intact.
Far as we’re concerned, it’s the American taxpayers who deserve to be pissed.
Source: Bloomberg
View Comments (21)
- again, 50% is too much for a 'bonus'. -I can't imagine why, with management like that, they ever had 'financial' problem. it's clear they have 'not' learned anything.
- have they ever considered lowering the price of their vehicles - if they have that much extra money? their consumers would appreciate the gesture.
For twenty years I work for Chrysler, best car I even owned was a Nissan.
PS: I was never a member of any Union.
The raw centre of capitalism is screwing over whoever you need to screw over to make one dollar...anyone who doesnt join a union when there is one to join, is basically a moron...i am a serious capitalist, but really who am i going to listen to, one man or a hundred men? When unions make gains, get money for their memebers I think good for them...thats capitalism
Uh-huh. Capitalism is "screwing over whoever you need to screw over to make a dollar." Is that what passes for logic in your circle of idiots? And if you're a carnivore why not just eat your wife and kids? They're made of meat, aren't they? See: hyperbole's pretty easy.
Capitalism sees a future, and to be alive in the future you have to move with good judgment. For years idiot hippies were calling Weyerhaeuser "despoilers of the land." But Weyerhaeuser took good care of their land. They had to. It was their bread & butter. Unions can't see the future. They stangle a company, or in the case of Detroit, an entire city.
You know who else can't comprehend the future? Drug users. They only comprehend what's happening at any given moment. That's how they can destroy their lives just for the kicks they get from recreational dizziness.
You sound like one of them. Please go take a fatal dose of whatever it is you enjoy so much.
Not sure what your point is. Look, if you can work ununionised for 15 dollars an hour or unionised for 22 why on earth would you take 15? It makes absolutley no sense.
If you are saying that the workers should consider the interests of management or bosses before their own interest that is not just crazy but completely against the fundemental dictate of how capitalism works. Or do you think that bosses employ people for the good of society?
I am as right wing as they come but I absolutely do not accept the lazy right wing populism that you get on Fox. Going off topic, I sometimes think that Fox is a wierd long term project to destroy the right by making it dumber and dumber until all that is left is the populism, national jingoism and bullshit right wing myths, you know the sort I mean, cut taxes to raise income that sort of thing.
Anyway back to what you wrote!! Have you worked high up in many companies? Well I have worked in a few and I can tell you that no company I have worked at has ever had a REAL internal direction for the future (as opposed to statements it makes pubically), instead the best you can say is that a company looks ahead one quarter. A maximum of six months. That is it.
Capitalism is greedy and devours itself. That`s why we love it. That`s why I love it. It makes money. Making money is great. You can do all kinds of things. But never delude yourself that it has no cost. That is for Fox viewers. There is always a cost and the non union workers pay the most.
...if you can work ununionised for 15 dollars an hour or unionised for 22 why on earth would you take 15?
If your daughter can make $22 working at an ordinary job or $1,000 as a call girl should she take the call girl job?
Morals DO enter into it.
You think work ethic is all based on money? People shouldn't want to do a good job at their tasks no matter what? Well, Mr. Right-wing-as-they-come, I hope you get blackmailed by a union someday. It's really fun. They tell you "Not good enough" no matter what you offer them, and they always come back for more until it's impossible for you to do business because you're forced to pay a guy movie-star wages to eat a sandwich and watch a machine put a bolt in a hole.
Go buy a house in Detroit. They're going cheap.
It is strange position I find myself in of defending unions but your logic is corrupt so I have no choice.Firstly your analogy about prostitutiuon is nonsense. It should be would a prostitute prefer to work for 1000 or 100 dollars a day not comparing contract workers with prostitutes. Second, prostitution is illegal and being in a union is not. Your analogy does not hold water.I will spell it out...monetery systems have nothing, absolutely nothing to do with morality except at a fraudulent level where there is a desire to marry corporate behaviour with personal morality, for example, a company will sell its move to China and making people redundant at home as good for shareholders, good for Chinese peasents, will increase chinese wealth who will in time look to buy quality goods made in US.This, of course, is bullshit, it is simply about greed and profit. Why is that hard to understand? You are not a child, your quality of life is determined by your capacity to have and then hold, money. Money is what it is about. And money is what it is about at every level. To hate unionised workers because they want more money when you support owners and managers when they want more money is sheer hyprocrisy. You should live in scandinavia you would love it. No one makes lots of money but everyone lives well. Good for them, its called socialism.But I want money, lots of money. I want to leave enough money so my kids and hopefully grandkids never have to work a day in their lives and Im nearly there. But this has nothing to do with corporate ethics which are just another form of the fraudulent morality of corporations.
I grew up with my bread buttered on both sides by the American automotive industry. My father with Ford, my mother with GM. I can remember her telling about the union getting people's jobs back for them when they deserved to be fired. As far as I am concerned UAW stands for Union of Assinine... I can't think of a good enough word so help me to fill it in.
I'm a Teamster. I work with a lot of dead-weight layabouts who brag about how little they do on the job. They're consistantly late or absent, and I'm forced to pick up the slack, doing th ejob of 3 or 4 guys.
Whenever one of them has been "fired" I rejoice. "Thank God! He's outta here! Now they can hire someone who will show up and... Oh. The union stepped in and saved his job." Yup. The lazy guy's back the next day, doing nothing and leaving early.
Thanks, "brotherhood" of Teamsters. Thank you and thank you again.
Hold on...are people here suggesting that the company refuse to honor its contractual agreements? What do we stand for if not the honoring of contracts? OK I was against the bailouts, completely against it, I would rather it went to hell and brought forward the day of judgement...but that didnt happen and the bailouts did and we are where we are...This website is full of socialists who are just envious people getting money.
Might want to look up the definition of "Socialists", there.
I'm so pissed right now just for GPs, if the gubment bails these UAW and Corporate Auto fat cats out again; I may just hit the streets with my guns and knives, screaming to high-heaven for armed revolt! Kill the marxists! Kill the maxists! Kill the marxists! Hang em on the walls, hang em by their ba**s. Kill them all, kill them all, 'till they topple and they fall!
It is a combination of unions, shitty management, and idiotic government.
The unions ask for too much, it is true. The management gives it to them, because they don't have the balls to say "you know, when you price yourself out of the market, then people stop buying the cars we make, and buy cars made in 'right to work' states."
The management does that because they have been bailed out before, and expect to get bailed out again by our idiot government, instead of hashing it out in the bankruptcy courts when they go bankrupt. The net effect is that the risk gets pushed onto the taxpayer, and the rewards go to the unions and the auto manufacturer management. They're divvying *our* tax dollars when they award themselves bonuses, and they are so damned sleazy that they can't even wait until people have forgotten *who* underwrote their stupidity.
It happened with the banks, and it will happen with every company that gets bailed out. That's what we get when we elect weasels in government that tell us what we want to hear.
The only solution is to stop federal government from bailing them out so that they spread the misery across state lines. If these creeps have to live in the backyard they shat in, then things will improve. But not before.
GM and Chrystler asses. The tax payers are paying out these bounses. I work for them both so where in the hell is my bonus check from each of them?
O that is right, the UAW president and the CEOs of both Gm and Chrsytler have mine.
"Oh no! Some of these companies are Too Big To Fail! Whatever shall we do!?"
"I know! Let's bail them out and make them even bigger!"
Nice work.
This is what happens when you bail people out; they have no incentive to change the behavior that got them into trouble in the first place. Businesses should either sink or swim...no help from the taxpayers.