April 14, 2016
Some readers may have been misled by a statement in a NYT article on the Verizon strike that the union members at Verizon receive an average of $130,000 a year in wages and benefits. This is what the company pays in labor costs per worker. This includes not only straight pay, but also overtime pay, employer-side Social Security and Medicare taxes, health insurance, and pension benefits. The pension payments are everything that Verizon pays into its pension, including payments to cover costs of retired employees, averaged over the size of its current unionized workforce.
While the $130,000 number would imply an average hourly wage of $65. The average non-overtime pay of Verizon’s workers is probably in the range of $35 to $40 an hourly. While this is still a relatively good wage in the U.S. economy, it is considerably lower than the $65 an hour that readers may have inferred from too quickly reading the article.
Comments