It's not necessarily wage, but compensation.
Briefly, there are two portions. You have a hard wage and then there's a non-wage benefit—health care, pension plans, and things like that.
Because of the structure of our health care in Canada primarily, but other benefits as well, Canada historically had about a $25-an-hour advantage over the American competitor in terms of investing in automotive. What our unions did in the last three or four negotiations is they went to the companies and said, “If you want labour peace, you'd better give us some of that advantage.” So they did that for particularly the non-wage side of Canadian compensation. That whittled down to the U.S. average, total, all in, wages and non-wage compensation in the United States, at about $75, and in Canada it was about $70. So we still had an advantage of about five bucks. It was in the high sixties, maybe $6 or $7.
What the UAW did was allow the vehicle companies in the United States to offload all their health care cost to the unions, and that picked up $18 to $20. Then there are two-tier wages and a variety of other things. They lowered their compensation from $75 down to $50, and we're still in the high sixties. So somebody has to face up to that in terms of competitiveness. Right now, Canada is the highest-cost jurisdiction anywhere in the world for manufacturing vehicles, whereas we used to be competitive with the United States...well, lower cost than the United States.
The problem the CAW faces is that we don't have health care to deal with because health care already is government paid. So where do they find $15 or $20? Two-tier wages might give you $5. Eliminating contract language and all the feather-bedding can go quite far.
When General Motors approached CAW for their new investments in the Camaro plant in Oshawa, without touching wages and compensation, they found $100 million of cost savings just by eliminating all the feather-bedding the unions had put into the contract.
So is it there? Possibly, but it looks like we're going to have to touch base wage, and if you try to touch base wage, you're looking at war. So get ready.