The CEO pay thing is a red herring. I think they are overpaid, but there is only one CEO and a small handful of people that make the really big money. GM, for example, has 167k employees. Giving a large number of them a big raise is a much bigger deal to the company than giving Mary Barra an extra $5M. The optics of execs making big money matter, of course, but as a percentage of the company's revenue, they are pretty small potatoes.
As for the rest of it, I'll preface this by saying I'm generally pro-union. Workers are much stronger together, and it's the union's job to get as much as it possibly can. Also, I worked in this industry for 15 years on the salaried side (engineering, not management), so I've been in the plants, worked side-by-side with UAW folks. Given that, I think there is more nuance to this particular situation.
I see a lot of people talking about the big profits the car companies have made. That's true. But not always. Several times in the past few decades we've seen these companies on the brink of disaster. Two of them have already been through bankruptcy. Part of what led to that was decades of giving the UAW whatever they wanted in order to keep the lines running. The Detroit 3 ended up with a much higher wage structure than their overseas competitors, which hamstrung them in a lot of ways. There were other factors, of course, not listening to the market, building low-quality crap, etc. But high wages played a part. Big companies get a lot of crap for short-term thinking. Agreeing to generous contracts is short-term thinking. Trying to minimize costs in the future is not. I'll reiterate, I don't blame the UAW for this AT ALL. It's their job to ask for the moon. If the companies are willing to give it to them, good for them. Management signed those contracts.
Also, these companies DO have to compete with companies that use non-union labor. That's just a fact. It's not fair, and those workers should organize, but they haven't, at least not yet. So the management of the companies has to keep that in mind. It would be irresponsible of them not to.
Finally, I don't know about you, but a 20% raise over four years, plus cost-of-living adjustments, seems pretty damn good to me. And they are guaranteeing their already-excellent health care plans. I'm not sure how much more the union thinks they can get, but it's obviously something. More power to them, but to me it seems like they've already done a great job to get the current offer. Time will tell.
