Before the bankruptcy, the US Autoworker cost roughly $100 an hour. One hundred dollars an hour. It wasn't cash compensation. I think they actually cost roughl

Before the bankruptcy, the US Autoworker cost roughly $100 an hour. One hundred dollars an hour. It wasn't cash compensation. I think they actually cost roughly $35 an hour in cash compensation (including payroll taxes and other direct costs). But the auto makers had to also ante up nearly twice as much more to cover pension and medical plan contributions for their workers, their families and their retirees. Now, I'm not saying it wasn't their fault, at least at some level. Productivity has reduced the amount of worker hours needed per car for the last hundred years, and that, along with the rise of german and japanese car makers, reduced the size of the domestic car makers workforces. In 1979 UAW membership peaked at 1.5M, in 2008 it was 650,000. The costs of covering the medical and retirement needs of 700,000 retirees is a lot higher proportion of your average wage with 650k workers than it was with 1.5M. Essentially management thought they'd never lose their massive market share, and didn't account for the ongoing march of increasing productivity. However they got there, those costs meant that the more labor costs a car had in proportion to it's sales price, the less competitive it would be for US car makers. That eventually meant that muscle cars, trucks, and SUVs were their only profitable cars, while they got killed by the Japanese and europeans on small cars. It's just another reason CAFE is dumb. Automakers never should have gotten credits for making small cars. It gave foreign car makers a substantial competitive advantage.