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> Right now United Auto Workers is asking for a 45% pay increase and working 32 hour weeks while getting paid for 40 hours (which is an additional 25% boost (they are certainly not going to produce 40 hours of work in 32 hours). And more.

> This represents a complete disconnect from reality. This kind of thing leads to outsourcing, automation and job loss. Entire industries have already been decimated by this kind of thing.

Do you know what the profit of Ford was for 2022? [1] 23 billion dollars. And how many people does Ford employ? [2] 173,000. That's $132,000 available for ford to pay each of their employees on top of salary they already paid.

Do you know how long it takes UAW's wage increase to take effect? [3] 4 years. (or roughly a 10% increase in pay each year).

Do you know what the ultimate max salary asked for is? [3] $47/hr or $75k/year

So you are saying a company that made enough profit (that is, revenue - expense, which includes employee wages) to give each of their employees a lump $132,000 bonus in 2022 couldn't afford 10% salary increases for the same employees over 4 years?

You should really sit down and do the math on this stuff. There's monied interest by car manufactures to paint this as uncharitably as possible. So of course you are going to see articles where these poor multi-billion dollar companies are just scraping by... with record profits.

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/F/ford-motor/gross...

[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/F/ford-motor/numbe...

[3] https://abcnews.go.com/Business/day-workweek-46-raise-uaw-ma...

That Ford 23 billion number you are citing is Gross Profit, not NET

This number ignores expenses that are not involved with the product and cost of goods sold.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/grossprofit.asp#toc-gro...

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/F/financials?p=F

"You should really sit down and do the math on this stuff."

Before coming in hot with numbers and firing back I would check what you are saying first.

Perhaps consider Hollywood accounting [1] before being concerned with net income. Suffice it to say, it's within ford's best interest to often report negative or near negative net profits. That's how you reduce your tax burden.

It's super easy for a company to make up additional overhead above and beyond gross profits to disappear everything. (including money spent on stock buybacks, dividend payments, and CEO perks).

A company that has 23 billion in gross profits and -2 billion net income isn't what you think it's saying.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting

If you are equating unregulated Hollywood accounting to SEC regulated 10-K filings, then either you need more education, or you distrust the system so much that conversing would be pointless.

And businesses cannot reduce net income by the amount of dividends or stock buybacks, for obvious reasons.

> If you are equating unregulated Hollywood accounting to SEC regulated 10-K filings, then either you need more education

Are you saying it wouldn't be advantageous to claim an easily recoverable loss which both makes your shareholders happy and reduces your tax burdens not only for the current year but future years (because you can defer losses)?

Hollywood accounting is orthogonal to the concept of a 10-k. The numbers are "real" but they are also VERY easy to manipulate (IE, doing a stock buyback).

I'd suggest considering the case study of sears. Where somehow a public company went bankrupt yet the owner ended up with billions of dollars and... the company.. again.. somehow. [1] That is hollywood accounting in it's full action and all perfectly lined up for 10-ks (after all, AFAIK the SEC never stepped in here to give Lampart so much of a slap on the wrist).

I'm not saying that Ford or others are anywhere near as bad as what happened to Sears/Kmart. I am saying that the same system Ford operates in, sears operates in.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/news/downfall-of-sears/

> Are you saying it wouldn't be advantageous to claim an easily recoverable loss which both makes your shareholders happy and reduces your tax burdens not only for the current year but future years (because you can defer losses)?

What is a “recoverable loss”?

>Hollywood accounting is orthogonal to the concept of a 10-k. The numbers are "real" but they are also VERY easy to manipulate (IE, doing a stock buyback).

Orthogonal means unrelated. It seems like you are using orthogonal to mean “similar”, but I am not sure, since that does not make sense. Either way, how does a stock buyback manipulate anything?

> I'd suggest considering the case study of sears. Where somehow a public company went bankrupt yet the owner ended up with billions of dollars and... the company.. again.. somehow. [1]

Because the owner was not Lampert, but a company with limited liability that happened to own many of the shares. And Lampert has done very poorly with his Sears investment, he has most likely lost wealth over the last 15 years when a riskless SP500 investment would have gained a ton.

https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/2bsxn8l0u5yr6z...

> What is a “recoverable loss”?

Unrelated to the topic at hand. I'm not accusing ford of omissions to their 10-K. That's not what Hollywood accounting means.

> It seems like you are using orthogonal to mean “similar”,

No, I mean orthogonal. You simply do not know what "Hollywood accounting" is.

> And Lampert has done very poorly with his Sears investment, he has most likely lost wealth over the last 15 years when a riskless SP500 investment would have gained a ton.

Really hard to say, but he was able to leverage 4.6 billion dollars [1] to repurchase sears.

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sears-chairman-eddie-lampert-of...

The SEC does not police tax loopholes. As long as everything they do is documented and legal, the SEC allows it. Hollywood accounting isn't some myth, giant companies like apple do it, where you can "lease" or "sell" intangibles like "IP" consisting only of your brand identity to a separate legal entity in a different jurisdiction that taxes it differently, allowing you to play games with who owns what, and who books what revenue, and who claims what income.

This is all SOP in any company big enough to have its own accounting department. That's like, their entire job and industry.

> It's super easy for a company to make up additional overhead above and beyond gross profits to disappear everything. (including money spent on stock buybacks, dividend payments, and CEO perks).

Share buybacks and dividend payments are uses of cash, but do not reduce net income. (They are not an expense.)

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/112013/impac....

https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/090415/are-dividend...

Goalpost shifting

Lol -2 billion in net income is exactly what I think it is saying. Are we saying Ford is committing accounting fraud or trickery?

"It's super easy for a company to make up additional overhead above and beyond gross profits to disappear everything."

What about administrative costs? What about debt? Do we ignore everything besides COGS?

Dividend payments, stock buybacks, etc are not ways to disappear everything. They are ways to make their stock attractive to buyers, keep them in dividend indices, etc

How is this whole thread ignoring standard accounting and the reality of properly running a business?

> Lol -2 billion in net income is exactly what I think it is saying. Are we saying Ford is committing accounting fraud or trickery?

No. That's a misrepresentation of what I'm saying. I'm not accusing ford of doing anything illicit with their accounting. I'm saying that net income is a number that's both easily and frequently gamed.

> What about administrative costs? What about debt? Do we ignore everything besides COGS?

Nope, I'm saying we should pay the "COGS" fairly because they are ultimately what makes the business run. The admin and shareholders can be paid after the cogs get paid.

Have you considered that money is fungible? The admin can take lower salaries, do less buybacks, and enter into less debt. And, in fact, I'd suggest (and you'd likely agree) that a good business does that anyways. If operational costs were 0, any business could still find a way to have negative income.

No, net income absolutely is not “easily gamed” for a publicly traded company.

You’re out of your element here.

You’re digging yourself into a deeper hole here.

You need to re-do your math. In addition to what others have said, if they start paying 40 hours pay for 32 hours work, they're going to have to hire 25% more people to produce the same number of cars - that is, to reach the same income.

Thanks for posting this. I was content to downvote and move on, but I think you did a good job here. A lot of what the post said is pretty handwavey and leaves out key details to the point of basically becoming FUD at worst, or charitably someone who has only a very superficial understanding of these things through a lack of doing any critical research on the topic.

You only hit on a couple of their points, but I note that all the rest of them at a glance are subject to the same sort of deficiency from critical analysis and factual sources.

Their premise is false, and when called out on it, they resorted to claiming the official numbers are fraudulent, with no source. Even though they chose an “official” number themselves as the premise for their argument.

Cite where I said the numbers are fraudulent.

That is what “Hollywood accounting” would be if it were subject to regulators.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37398156

Do you think Hollywood is not subject to regulators?

Does Disney file a 10-K? Has star wars made a profit?

I'd suggest reading the linked wikipedia article first to understand what hollywood accounting actually is. It is neither illegal nor fraudulent. It is arguably immoral, but we aren't talking about morals in this thread. I'll assume you simply don't know what the term Hollywood accounting actually means and that's why you thought I was saying Ford committed fraud.

> Does Disney file a 10-K?

Yes, and they are not required to breakdown financial figures for each movie they make.

> It is neither illegal nor fraudulent.

Because it is not subject to regulations, it is specifically designed to screw various vendors in the movie business, without violating any business agreements (or skirting the line so that it is not worth the counterparty to file a lawsuit).

If Disney did try to submit a 10-K with the same calculations they do for their “Hollywood accounting”, it would be illegal.

The key point in the Hollywood accounting Wikipedia write up is:

> Because of the studio's ability to place arbitrary charges along the value chain, net participation "points" (a percentage of the net income as opposed to a percentage of the gross income of a film) are sometimes referred to as "monkey points". The term is attributed to Eddie Murphy, who is said to have also stated that only a fool would accept net points in their contract.

This is all irrelevant for SEC filings, since those have to include ALL ins and outs of the business. If a Disney CEO tried to screw investors by artificially lowering net income and reducing the investors’ profit, heads would roll.

This is ignoring the basic fact that CEO and other company executives are compensated in shares in the first place, which means they want net income to be high so that the share price goes higher.

> This is all irrelevant for SEC filings, since those have to include ALL ins and outs of the business. If a Disney CEO tried to screw investors by artificially lowering net income and reducing the investors’ profit, heads would roll.

The Disney CEO wouldn't screw investors by lowering net income. Investors aren't (generally) compensated with income. In fact, the opposite is true, Disney can force net income down buy doing a stock buy back which drives the stock prices higher. There's a reason investors, for the most part, ignore net income. In fact, always having a positive net income is generally a sign that the company is not investing and growing, which in and of itself is generally treated as a negative sign from investors.

> This is ignoring the basic fact that CEO and other company executives are compensated in shares in the first place, which means they want net income to be high so that the share price goes higher.

Net income is barely a predictor for stock prices (especially now-a-days). For example, disney had a 170% increase in net income in their March quarterly report. Did they see a 170% increase in stock price? A 17% increase? Or a slight loss?

> In fact, the opposite is true, Disney can force net income down buy doing a stock buy back which drives the stock prices higher.

Again, this is false.

> Net income is barely a predictor for stock prices (especially now-a-days).

This is also false. Sort by net income (aka earnings) here:

https://companiesmarketcap.com/

Uh.

23 billion was the gross profit

12 billion operating income

-1.9 billion net income

Ie they lost money in 2022 when all was said and done.

Also no company that has taken outside money from investors can just give their profits to employees and not share the profits back to the investors.

No investor would ever give money to a company where their share of the profits - which they were duly owed because they took a risk and put money into an enterprise - is not returned to them - and instead shared to employees because it’s the righteous thing to do.

No CEO or CFO would keep their jobs for long if they did this.

That’s just not how capitalism works.

This is just such a ridiculously limited view of how investment can work and what capitalism is.

Tons of investors give money to companies without any realistic expectation of ever receiving any profits - they believe that the value of the stock they own will increase in the judgement other future stock owners. That's the only reason Amazon was able to receive capital investment for more than a decade.

Workers also take a risk in choosing to go work for a company, and frequently it is a bigger risk than the one taken by capital owners. The latter will rarely invest in a way that puts their lifestyle on the line, whereas that's all the former can do.

There are pros and cons of the capitalist system, but it does neither capitalism nor us humans any service to present this sort of childish 10th grade view of what it is and how it works (or doesn't).

> Heck, if you are passionate about this, lets pass legislation that allows restaurants to charge a variable rate.

Why would legislation be needed for this? Hotels/airlines/rental car prices change all day every day, most probably via computer programs by now.

There are already “market” price menus at restaurants and differing prices for lunch and dinner menus.

There was a cheap restaurant near me where the chef, as a joke, decided to add a exorbitantly expensive (for them) dinner entree. Customers were supposed to see it was a joke and not order it. It backfired, and soon the chef found himself regularly buying ingredients for this entree. Unfortunately, the reason he priced it so high was because sourcing those ingredients was a huge hassle. He stopped selling that item, but not before learning a lesson about what customers (not necessarily his) in his area are able to afford.

No business has an absolute right to exist, if you can’t break even no one owes you anything.

And as a democratic society we have the right to set minimum standards for labor. We should do this with a realistic understanding of the outcome, but if some businesses become unworkable that’s fine.

> We were paying $30K to move a container that used to cost $2K. You can bet that cost had to be passed on to customers. And the result? Less orders. Less work. We had to let people go.

If it's so easy, a new player will enter the market

If it's truly too expensive to ship the goods you want, you need to stop sourcing things astronomically far to be efficient. The same economic effect causing the the steel factory to be down the river from the mines is still in play.

> If it's truly too expensive to ship the goods you want, you need to stop sourcing things astronomically far to be efficient.

I saw a picture of canned peaches that said the peaches were grown in Argentina and canned in Vietnam.

Those peaches made two trips across the Pacific just to get on a grocery store shelf in America.

It's ridiculous.

A video about how “Grown in Argentina, Packed in Thailand” actually ends up making sense

https://youtu.be/0aH3ZTTkGAs

The summary is that pears must be picked 1-2 weeks before they are ripe and are allowed to ripen under refrigeration (otherwise the inside ripens first and they get mushy). Instead of running air conditioners, a ship running in cold water provides “free” air conditioning. The biggest market for room-temperature stable fruit in syrup is south east Asia, so packing in Thailand is closest to the biggest customer base. And with the scale they have there, it makes sense to just pack the fruit for the smaller markets like the US at the same place instead of creating secondary supply chains for each market.

Right, let the free market work and it will. If you find yourself swimming against the tide of the market, you are either going to get very rich or very poor. Generally best to stay in your lane.

It was "the free market" that gave us peaches travelling twice across the Pacific to get to a grocery store.

Massively lower labor costs in two countries, and lack of the infrastructure in one of them: the typical scenario for capital to seek out these energetically absurd but (temporarily) profitable arrangements.

I already posted a comment saying something like this to the story here, but it's likely enough that the energy the consumer spends bring the can of peaches home exceeds the energy used to get it to the store. Where's absurd defined?

The fact that mass-scale transportation of goods means that the amortized cost/impact per can of peaches is small doesn't invalidate the point that mass-scale transportation of goods is energetically ridiculous and likely adds about 3% of global greenhouse gases.

Sometimes the amortized cost per unit isn't the important point.

Of course the amortized cost is important. If people eat a lot of steak and one steak is ten years of peaches, we should focus on the steak!

"Hey everyone, I know the world is doing just fine, but I have this new idea. We'll burn giga-joules of energy every year shipping stuff all over the place, but not to worry, because the joules-per-can-of-peaches is hardly anything".

OK, then.

Correct, even if the world isn't doing fine.

Thankfully we don't have to choose between dealing with the insanity of shipping everything everywhere six times during production to take advantage of cheap labor and lax regulation somewhere, and steak production being terrible for the environment.

We can get rid of ALL the stupid things that are "profitable" to a few middlemen but nobody else.

Offset by international tensions, Panama canal backups etc. These are all economic costs. Keep up or die

1> If it's so easy, a new player will enter the market

2> If it's truly too expensive to ship the goods you want, you need to stop sourcing things astronomically far to be efficient. The same economic effect causing the the steel factory to be down the river from the mines is still in play.

This thread has some of the dumbest comments from people who obviously know nothing whatsoever about business. Lending validity to the Dunning-Kruger idea, people somehow think they actually know what they are talking about.

The above two comments fall under this category. And yet, I will address both of them in hopes that (1) someone will learn something and (2) others will refrain from posting comments about shit they know nothing about.

Having an opinion doesn't make it valid.

It would be like me posting about heart surgery. I would fully expect people to laugh I what I might say and let me know just how stupid I am to pretend I understand the subject --and rightly so.

Comment 1: Short version: Impossible.

The shipping industry, from 2020 until somewhere around 2022 was a complete mess. The cost of moving a container from Asia to the US (and anywhere else) rose by a factor of 10x to 15x. From approximately USD $2,000 to somewhere in a range between $20K to $30K.

If you were shipping something other than to China, good luck. We had to ship a few crates to Singapore. Ocean freight that normally takes a couple of weeks was being quoted to require at least THREE MONTHS and at a very high price. Why? Because all shipping capacity got diverted to China.

We ended-up having to air-freight. Even that took a ridiculous amount of time. I don't even want to talk about how much more the shipment cost than normal air freight. It was a mess.

Ports were stacked with containers not going anywhere.

New players?

It takes three years or more to build a new ship at a cost of a hundred million dollars. That is, assuming a normal economy and supply chains. In the period between 2020 and 2022, good luck building anything at scale. Car manufacturers had to make cars without components and park them until they could get those components. To make a dent you'd need to build, I don't know, 100 to 500 ships, if not more. Which means making an investment between $10 billion and $50 billion. BTW, during difficult times like that, anyone taking an order to build such ships would likely charge a 25% to 50% premium. We are talking about a potential $75 billion investment.

That investment would result in ships being ready to sail not earlier than 2026. By that time, with things back to some version of normal, freight pricing would also return to a normal trading range. Which, in turn, likely means whoever made that investment would be facing bankruptcy and that CEO would also be out of a job for being a dumbshit.

Comment 2: Not sure how to reply to this other than to be surprised by the lack of connection to reality the comment reveals.

OK, well. We don't make anything in the US and Europe any more. Our supply chains are long. And there's no way around it.

Bring manufacturing back?

OK. Well, this will take decades. In some cases it is absolutely impossible. In other cases it would require 25 years of solid investment in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

Do you actually think we can pull off anything even remotely close to this when we can't even build a high speed train across California. Our politicians have failed us for at least five decades. If we our nation was united and our politicians --all of them-- actually worked towards goals for the benefit of the nation and its people, maybe we could pull some portion of that back in 25 years. As we exist and behave today? No way in hell. Not happening. Ever.

During the pandemic, the world discovered that nobody could make N95 masks. One of the simplest products to manufacture. Not only could we not make the masks. We didn't make the machines that make the masks. And we didn't make the cloth needed to make the masks, or the machines that make the cloth.

People who are not in manufacturing don't really have a sense of just how bad things are in this sense. We can't make anything. If China decided to shut down exports for six months the world would descend into the dark ages. It's that bad.

So, yeah, comment <2> is just, well, being kind, misplaced.

Next time you post about something, be sure you actually know what you are talking about. Don't be like me talking about open heart surgery. Good for comedy, and not much more than that.

> This represents a complete disconnect from reality. This kind of thing leads to outsourcing, automation and job loss. Entire industries have already been decimated by this kind of thing.

You're a fool if you think outsourcing, automation, and job loss weren't going to happen regardless.

"Oh yes, we love our workers and as long as they don't get too uppity, we'd never dream of trying to replace them with technology that will cut our labor costs in half" - said no one, ever.

> For example, nobody is going to go to McDonalds and pay $50 for a cheeseburger. They might pay half that much at a celebrity high-end restaurant, yet, at McDonalds, the limit is somewhere around $5, or 1/10.

FWIW, a Big Mac near me is now $7, add fries and a drink and it's $11.58. They've still got customers, although the lines seem shorter than they used to be. At least they haven't started asking for tips.

Fast food is not particularly cheap but people buy it out of habit or because they perceive they don't really have another realistic option.

Well and it's fast.

Yet you see many of these companies make huge profits each year , you see CEO getting paid obscene salaries and those is being increased at much % than workers.

GM CEO salary went up from 23M to 29M between 2021 and 2022.

Signals matter , if you expect workers to empathize with management then management should not be getting 30% hikes y-o-y on top making 500-1000x the salary of an average worker .

Did the GM CEO salary go up? Or did GM’s share price go up, causing the previously scheduled stock grants to increase in market price?

Usually, the vast majority of compensation is scheduled a few years in advance, defined as a certain number of shared. Clickbait is then made using changed in the price of these shares even though the compensation agreements did not change.

How does that matter ? Compensation is compensation. It is still money she gets to spend, don’t you think the board and she calculated the potential increases and bargained accordingly? Does it not cost the company and shareholders the same whether paying in options or cash [1]

Shall we tie all workers compensation to a high base + lots of options ?

- 2020 profit $13.672B - 2021 profit $17.878B - 2023 profit $20.981B - 2023 profit $22.344B

Yet GM cannot afford to give 10% year on year hikes for next 4 years ?

If management is responsible for profits then they are responsible for the losses too do they return money back in bad times ? Of course not , they will just negotiate more options to compensate for low price . Do you think she will stay and work even one year at her base compensation level of 2M ?

hypothetically let’s say the better salary is going to cost GM 10B a year . The profit would halve and stock would crash , it would still be a healthy company with 15B in profits but management and shareholders will be pissed, would it bad outcome for society or the company ?

In a unregulated capitalist ecosystem, the company will always pay the bare minimum, the shareholders and management incentives will not allow anything else .

Look at Apple for even starker example, most valuable company on earth unimaginable profits every year yet they pay their retail staff peanuts and don’t give them basic benefits because they can and the market expects them to.

[1] It does , all else being the same - They could have sold the stock for the same money in the market, or simply not diluted everyone with new issues and increased the stock price to reflect that.

> How does that matter ?

It matters because words have meanings and using words correctly facilitates effective discussions.

yea, but hiding behind the differences in meaning does also not help effective discussion.

i get where you're coming from, but also sympathize with the position of "if the compensation changes in value, the value of the compensation has changed"

maybe time to question this whole stock option thing for c-suite and just grant all employees a similar share of company performance

UAW members already get a profit sharing bonus!

"Today’s announcement that eligible UAW-Stellantis members will receive a record average profit-sharing amount of $14,760..."

"Ford...members are expected to receive an average of $9,176 in profit sharing."

"UAW members who work for General Motors received the news that they may receive up to $12,750 in profit sharing"

https://uaw.org/tag/profit-sharing/

ime a lot of companies do this, but most don't

also phrasings like "average" and "up to" tend to obstruct an important part of the picture (i.e. the common worker)

The text upthread that started this was “GM CEO salary went up from 23M to 29M between 2021 and 2022.”

That is both wrong and misleading. Wrong for obvious reasons, but misleading because the nature of salary is that statement suggests that someone (the board or compensation committee) made an explicit decision to change their salary from $X to $Y.

One could of course question whether such compensation schemes are moral at all.

My answer won't fit in the margin of HN's CSS controlled layout.

How is choosing to take ownership/equity in a company in lieu of cash as compensation inherently immoral? If the complaint is about the compensation structure and not the amount. You'd have to hold some pretty fringe views on ownership in general(re: homes, cars, small businesses etc.) to question that.

Stock based compensation means that the value of the compensation is based on the stock market's assessment of the company's value, which may change over time.

However, the notion that any increase (or decrease) in that assessed value is the result of the work of the executive in question is almost always false. So, if the stock gains 10%, the stock-compensation gains 10% ... but non-stock compensated employees, who may have been just as responsible for the 10% gain, if not more so, likely see either no gain or a smaller one.

Stock-based compensation for any employee that is not available to all employees is just allowing the ones who receive it to free-ride on the back of the accomplishments (or failures) of the entire enterprise.

Giving management equity was done to mitigate the Principal-Agent problem[2], lesser management(agent) is aligned to shareholders(principal), less likely they will take action on their behalf effectively.

However this puts management interest in direct conflict with employees . More you exploit/squeeze the last bit of productivity the law and job market permits you will do so in determinant of employee health, fair and living wages.

As a shareholder, that is rational behavior, you only care to maximize returns to the extent permissible by the law[2] . Environment, employees or any other non profit concern cost money if not required by law why should you do it? the competition will not be doing it. They will become cheaper and be able to out compete.

Aligning management to shareholders solved the problem for shareholders, but it has made the problems for workers worse, combined with weak labor protections in this country means only protection workers have is the market, if their skills are niche and in-demand they will be able to negotiate better wages, otherwise they are screwed.

---

America's unique strong immigration over the last two centuries is why labor protections are pretty weak compared to most of Europe and other developed economies, if citizen labor protests too much, America in the past always imported foreign labor to keep the supply high and market cheap for businesses.

Funnily all the right wing anti-immigration rhetoric is really anti-business as it gets- if it actually impacts policy in reduced immigration then workers will be able to push the labor demand-supply equation to their favor as they did in 30s. This is not necessarily a good thing for workers in the long term either, when America no longer is able to attract talent in same way as before, jobs will go abroad instead of being cheap and domestic.

---

[1] Even when required by law, we will the follow the law only if there is any real threat of enforcement and penalties actually that are high enough to hurt. When the cost of breaking the law is negligible or non existent the law will likely be ignored.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...

Can you cite anything about UAW asking for a 45% pay increase / 32 hour work week? It sounds like either hyperbole or not the entire story.

They're asking for 20% to offset recent inflation and then 5% per year until 2027[0].

Misrepresenting a cumulative 4 year increase as a single upfront one is honestly disgusting behaviour. I can only hope that GP shares the same level of disdain for the CEOs of these companies who actually received a 40% increase in their compensation over the last 4 years[0].

[0] https://eu.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/2023/08/03/u...

> Misrepresenting a cumulative 4 year increase as a single upfront one is honestly disgusting behaviour.

It's not. Even under normal conditions, central banks aim for 2% inflation per year, and a further 3% increase in wages is everything but disgusting - it's time for the workers to get back more of the profits that the megacorporations distribute to shareholders, especially as productivity increases historically have not been redistributed to the employees. Time for the latter to be compensated as well.

I think you misread GP's comment pretty badly.

They're saying that misrepresenting the UAW demand as a 45% increase is disgusting, not that the 45% figure is itself disgusting.

As sokoloff has pointed out, we don't disagree with one another. My comment was a criticism of those who portray workers' demands as a single massive increase, rather than a small yearly increase.

https://abcnews.go.com/Business/day-workweek-46-raise-uaw-ma...

The truth of course is somewhat less than the headline. It's +47% over four years, and more importantly, starting pay today is effectively $10/hr less than what it was in 2007. This isn't so much a raise, as it is 20 year past due cost of living adjustment.

As far as the 32 hour per week, why not? Worker productivity has risen, it's about time we start getting that John Maynard Keynes promised 15 hours week.

Not hyperbole, but the 45% increase is over a 4 year period (so 10% increase each year).

>If you want people at McDonalds to make $50 hour, go pay $25 for a burger. Heck, if you are passionate about this, lets pass legislation that allows restaurants to charge a variable rate. They post the minimum they want for their product and the customer is allowed to pay more. Brilliant. We can align cost and wages with ideology.

The price of skyrocketing their wages is more like $0.35 more, not $45 more. Also, managers frequently and systematically steal employees' tips; it's not a good system and you shouldn't support it (note: that does not mean "don't tip").

In Germany, there is an account people can donate money to, to reduce state debt ("Schuldentilgungskonto"), without any personal benefit. It's not even tax deductible. I think that would qualify to refute your last paragraph. It's not used a lot, though. 1.33M in 16 years.