These people work on assembly lines and what not, they need the health coverage, I will not need it as much sitting behind a computer punching numbers might give me bad eye sight and carpel tunnel not a bad back and aching legs/arms, maybe have something fall on me etc etc. They deserve to get good benefits. Usually, for most big companies, the fringe benefits are about ~30% of their pay, so no I am not surprised, because that’s how this works, I see it every single day, I write up the budgets.
The number seems way too high, so I thought they lumped in the wages of CEO’s, maybe it doesn’t. I am still not sure about that, but did you read the actual statement
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.