Auto Workers Don't Make $70 Per Hour

On my drive home I was listening to Mike Malloy and someone called in blaming the unions for the auto collapse, and said auto workers make over $100,000 a year. Malloy laughed at the guy for blaming the unions, and didn't seem to know much about the $70/hr claim (he was probably stunned- since it seems obviously ridiculous).

When I got home I see this on Daily Kos:

But then what's the source of that $70 hourly figure? It didn't come out of thin air. Analysts came up with it by including the cost of all employer-provided benefits--namely, health insurance and pensions--and then dividing by the number of workers. The result, they found, was that benefits for Big Three cost about $42 per hour, per employee. Add that to the wages--again, $24 per hour--and you get the $70 figure. Voila.

Except ... notice something weird about this calculation? It's not as if each active worker is getting health benefits and pensions worth $42 per hour. That would come to nearly twice his or her wages. (Talk about gold-plated coverage!) Instead, each active worker is getting benefits equal only to a fraction of that--probably around $10 per hour, according to estimates from the International Motor Vehicle Program. The number only gets to $70 an hour if you include the cost of benefits for retirees--in other words, the cost of benefits for other people.