FLINT, Mich. -- All day, Judy Rowe sits in a room at a large, old Delphi Corp. auto parts plant here, reading, sewing or staring into space.
For this she earns $31.80 an hour.
There are 70 people in this room, all employed by Michigan-based Delphi and protected by the United Auto Workers union. They clock in at 6 a.m. and clock out at 2:30 p.m.
But there is nothing for them to do.
"I think I'm slipping into a depression," said Rowe, who has been languishing for six years in this strange and very unique form of unionized employment limbo known as the jobs bank.
If there was work to do, they would be on the manufacturing lines. But there isn't. And they can't be laid off because their union contracts include this unique provision.
The jobs bank is a bullpen of sorts for surplus workers. It was designed two decades ago as a temporary haven that has become a permanent and expensive catch basin for declining auto industry companies.
There are 4,000 workers in the jobs bank at Delphi, which has filed for bankruptcy, and an additional 6,300 in the jobs banks at struggling Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Corp. There are 2,500 more at Chrysler.
At the Delphi East plant in Flint, they get their full salaries for sitting in a large room.
I have no idea what the average wage is for these "bullpen" workers, but just to illustrate a point say they all make about $25/hour. That means Delphi Corp. is paying out $800,000 each and every day for these workers. That works out to $4,000,000 a week and $200,000,000 every year. Plus the cost of payroll taxes and benefits these employee are no doubt collecting as well.
That is an enormous amount of expenditure for something the business gets absolutely no return on.
We often talk about how foreign car companies have bettered domestic car companies in the last few decades. I often wonder if that hasn't taken place not because American workers are lazy or unambitious but rather because the auto industry has been crippled by unions. Think about it. If domestic car companies didn't have to contend with the inflated wages, exorbitant benefits and dead-weight expense created by unions they may have been able to put more money into the research and design it takes to keep up with foreign competitors. Or they could have had more room to compete in price wars. Whatever.
The point is that these unions are putting American businesses at a disadvantage, and that's not good for this country.
(via reader Likwidshoe)