The Booming Auto Industry (For Real), That Is, The Bailout Is About Bailing Out Auto Unions

If you don't have the albatross of above market union wages and legacy payments, you can do pretty well in the auto industry. Mark Perry writes:

On Monday, Honda celebrated the opening of its $550-million, nonunion plant in Greensburg, Indiana, capable of producing 200,000 vehicles annually, highlighting the contrast between the healthy Asian automaker and its ailing domestic rivals.

And even though the starting hourly wage at the plant is $18.41, or roughly $10 less than an average Detroit Three worker, demand for these jobs was off the charts. When Honda announced it was hiring 900 employees, 33,000 people applied. Honda eventually plans to employ about 2,000 at the plant, which started production in October.

Here's Perry on union versus non-union wages :

For a time, unionized workers can enjoy higher-than-market compensation, and job security. To the extent that union labor costs are higher and therefore the profits of unionized firms are lower (GM, Ford), investment expenditures will flow into the nonunion sector (Toyota, Honda, Nissan, see CD post on Honda's new Indiana plant) and away from unionized firms. As a result, the growth of productivity and employment, as well as market share, will tend to lag in the unionized sector (from 90% market share in the 1960s for the Big 3, to 47% today).

The larger the wage premium of unionized firms and the greater the guarantees of job stability, the greater the incentive to shift production toward nonunion operations (Honda, Toyota). Empirical evidence shows that industries and companies with the largest union wage premiums and greatest guarantees of job stability (Big Three) are precisely the industries and companies with the largest declines in the employment of unionized workers.

Bottom Line: Gains in the short run of higher-than-market wages and benefits, and greater job security, eventually undermine the companies employing unionized workers, destroying hundreds of thousands of union jobs in the long run (172,000 UAW jobs lost at GM alone). The more success a union has in the short-run, the greater the failure in the long run. The discipline of the market eventually dominates and prevails.