This is a good step to help improve the wages of the employees in GM. The added healthcare benefits are also welcomed changes that should improve the working standards of the employees in general. In this economy, any pay rise should be a welcomed one.

Because Democrats control unions the unions seek extraordinarily expensive “healthcare” benefits for their union members only, and oppose the only sane and sensible healthcare societal solution (Single-Payer for all).

Democrat control of unions has turned them into counter-revolutionary corporate-state collaborating organizations — “progressive” organizations intent upon gaining and maintaining benefits for themselves in exchange for their depraved complicit support of America’s neoliberal policies of perpetual war and ruthless global economic exploitation.

THE ROAD TO PERDITION

Without seeing the exact breakdown of both compensation AND benefits (pension, health etc.), it is difficult to tell whether $56/hour installs GM on the road to perdition.

What may be clear, however, is that Health Care will be a large portion of that breakdown. Which brings not only GM but all American manufacturing plants back to the same consequence of a Highly Exaggerated Private HC insurance costs.

From WikiP, prior to bankruptcy:

In order to improve profits, the Detroit automakers had made deals with unions to reduce wages while making pension and health care commitments. GM, for instance, at one time picked up the entire cost of funding health insurance premiums of its employees, their survivors and GM retirees, as the US did not have a universal health care system

Which is why a Public Option National Health Service (that mandates services pricing) is key to retaining manufacturing jobs in the US. Exploding HC service costs must be controlled by price-mandates or the renaissance of the automotive Big3 is doomed. As well may be American manufacturing as a whole.

Total Compensation – including Benefits – averages $27/hour for US workers. So, GM is easily paying double that amount. Let’s presume that both the average could be maintained and a National Health Care coverage added to it, without destroying totally America’s competitiveness. But GM’s position remains way out of line and the unions should know better.

The OECD in 2007 put US total Health Care costs at $7300 per capita in the US versus half that amount in France - and France has already outsourced the assembly of its small cars to Romania. It is therefore entirely possible that GM will be obliged to fall-back on its strategy of the pre-bankruptcy days – when it depended, to make ends meet, on high-margin models (namely, SUVs). It’s Chevrolet division has outsourced small and very-small car production to India, but this is a low-margin niche. (The models are showing up in Europe, including one that is an SUV.)

That strategy for the most part is a bummer, but all the high-cost car manufacturers around the world are pursuing it, so why not the Big3 in Detroit?

Here’s why: Big ticket items in a world where petroleum prices are high will find smaller and smaller market niches as the family-car downsizes – particularly with the advent of electric-motor cars.

It seems more reasonable that Big3 unions accept lower Comp & Ben because the “good times” are gone forever. They are now working in a world where World-market Wages apply. Is American union management so thick that it cannot understand that “given”. Let us hope not.

And Americans in general should know better that the country needs GREATLY a National Health Coverage run/financed by the Dept. of Health and not private BigInsurance in order to remain competitive.

MY POINT

Key to American long term economic survival is a National Health Care system and the ability of the American people to get a handle on their Obesity Challenge that causes most of their HC-costs.