PAYBACK. Dean Baker has the goods on some shady behavior at The Wall Street Journal. In advance of the contract renegotiations between the UAW and the big automakers, the WSJ has a story pegging compensation for UAW members at around $75 an hour. That's absurdly high, given that their base pay is $20-$25 an hour. We'd be talking $100,000 a year in benefits to reach $75. So what's going on? "What the auto industry does to get this figure," explains Baker, "is they average in their health care and pension costs for their retirees. These are real expenses for the industry, but they have nothing to do with the compensation received by current workers." That's sketchy work, and the WSJ shouldn't be repeating it so credulously. As a broader point, for reasons I don't entirely understand, the discourse seems to consider it a general injustice that blue collar autoworkers pull down high salaries, and much energy goes into inflating those numbers to make them seem all the worse. The higher the number, the more elite pundits seem to recoil at it, and the more they seem sure that readers will agree that the pay is wildly inflated -- unlike that of newspaper columnists. It's odd, though not entirely, I fear, untrue. There's an implicit accusation of a zero-sum workplace wherein the decent pay of autoworkers harms everyone else, or should at least be offensive to everyone else. This perspective is generally advanced by the very same folks who cannot conceive of why anyone cares about rocketing CEO pay. --Ezra Klein
