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Comment by moffkalast | Hacker News Reader

So, a 13th salary? This is fairly common.

Mercedes Benz is an IG Metall company. So this is on top of the 13th-14th salary that is standard throughout the whole industry. This is basically their way of going above-and-beyond the industry Tarifvertrag (that is already considered to be quite generous for German standards).

I don't understand what you mean by this. I'm not sure what it is in Germany, but an auto plant employee in the US would max out there salary around $50 or $60k/year with overtime. Many make much less than that. This is probably a 10 to 20% bonus for many of their workers, which is extremely high for factory work.

> an auto plant employee in the US would max out there salary around $50 or $60k/year with overtime

That's definitely wrong.

GM has said its average hourly worker earns around $90,000 in wages, overtime and profit sharing. The only workers who can reach that level are skilled trades, about 15% of the workforce, the UAW said. In-progression and temp workers earn much less.

However, a GM spokesman countered that skilled trades workers earn up to $123,000 annually, including profit sharing and overtime but not benefits.

https://www.freep.com/story/money/cars/2019/09/27/gm-strike-...

Skilled trades workers can make that much, but those aren’t the majority of jobs.

Glassdoor says Mercedes Benz production workers make about $18/hour on average: https://www.glassdoor.com/Hourly-Pay/Mercedes-Benz-USA-Assem...

In some countries it is tradition for the company to pay out a "13th month" of salary as bonus. (Just explaining the reference)

It that really the going rate for an auto worker in the US these days? I knew people making $100k+ per year at those jobs 30 years ago. They worked as much overtime as they could get but some of them saved a ton. Others bought boats and second homes.

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