GM Workers to Get Record Bonuses
Bloomberg reports:
General Motors Co., the largest U.S. automaker, said it expects to give unionized U.S. hourly employees profit-sharing checks averaging at least $4,000 as it prepares to negotiate a labor contract this year.
The payout is more than double the previous record for bonuses paid to GM’s hourly workers, the Detroit-based company said today in an e-mailed statement. GM said the previous record for its hourly workers’ checks was an average $1,775 in 1999.
GM, Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler Group LLC are preparing for contract talks this year with the United Auto Workers as the union seeks a share of the industry’s prosperity. GM, which earned $4.77 billion in the first three quarters of last year, wants to avoid “lockstep” annual raises to all employees and instead pay bonuses tied to profitability, said Logan Robinson, a law professor at the University of Detroit Mercy.
“A nice fat check will make the workers sympathetic to a plan like that,” Robinson, a former general counsel at auto- parts maker Delphi Corp., a GM spinoff, said in an interview.
The exact payout for GM’s 45,000 eligible employees will be disclosed during the company’s earnings release in late February, the automaker said.
The payouts to union workers are “a good example of how we are sharing in the success” of GM, the company and the UAW said in a joint letter distributed to the automaker’s plants.
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