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German Car Factories Pay Workers Twice as Much as US Factories, Still Profitable
2011 Dec 28, 11:57am 7,347 views 20 comments
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but you cannot buy it in the U.S. I'm not sure why. I think if they sold it here, thry could steal a lot of minivan sales form Honda and Toyota.
One look at that van and I seriously doubt they would steal much business from the other minivan makers. Secondly, bringing such a 'pedestrian' Mercedes here would dilute their "exclusive", luxurious image.
HousingWatcher
@
2011 Dec 30, 6:30am
Yeah, but some Mercedes could sell here if they imported to the U.S., like the B Class:
HousingWatcher
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2011 Dec 30, 11:51am
The MErcedes Viano actually has a cool interior that I think makes it more impressive than your typical minivan. You an reverse the 2nd row seats and a fulll sized table pops up. As someone who regularly eats hot food in my car, I can't tell you how much I would love to have such a feature in my Odyssey.
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So much for the big lie that uniosn and their high pay are bankrupting the US auto industry.
A tale of two systems
In 2010, over 5.5 million cars were produced in Germany, twice the 2.7 million built in the United States. Average compensation (a figure including wages and employer-paid benefits) for autoworkers in Germany was 48.97 Euros per hour ($67.14 US), while compensation for auto work in the United States averaged $33.77 per hour, or about half as much as in Germany, all according to 2007 data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For Germany-based auto producers, the U.S. is a low-wage country.
Despite German companies' relatively high labor costs in their home markets, these firms are quite profitable. An examination of the latest publically available financial statements of BMW, Daimler (Mercedes-Benz cars), and Volkswagen reveals strong sales and profits even in the midst of the currently weak consumer markets in Europe and the U.S. In 2010, for example, BMW, produced 1.48 million cars (63 percent of them in Germany), and earned a before-tax profit from its automotive division of 3.88 billion Euros. The Mercedes-Benz car division of Daimler, likewise produced 1.35 million cars (72.4 percent in Germany) in 2010, and earned a before-tax profit of 4.65 billion Euros.
Workers in the German auto industry maintain high wages and good working conditions through two overlapping sets of institutions. First, in the auto industry, virtually all workers are unionized members of IG Metall, the German autoworkers' union. With such union density, workers have considerable power to keep wages high. German autoworkers have the right to strike, but as Horst Mund, head of the International Department of IG Metall explained to Remapping Debate, they “hardly use it, because there is an elaborate system of conflict resolution that regularly is used to come to some sort of compromise that is acceptable to all parties.”
http://www.remappingdebate.org/article/tale-two-systems?page=0,0