Industry, Real Wages, And Childish Managers

This weekend, the CEOs of several German car manufacturers decided to behave like three year old kids because they really want that chocolate bar low labor costs; and are against a minimum wage of €8.50 and for a huge amount of "temporary" workers. The CEOs of Daimler, VW, Opel and BMW were interviewed by the Bild Zeitung and Daimler CEO Zetsche even threatened Mutti* Merkel that the company would "have to think about a relocation of production".

Let's take a look at some of the firms and the overall situation in the German industry.


 For example BMW:

	2012	2002	Change
Wages and Salaries	€7.086b	€5.541b	27.9
Social charges and reserves	€1.449b	€1.047b	38.4
Total personnel expenses	€8.535b	€6.588b	29.6
Revenue	€76.85b	€42.3b	81.7
Car production	1,845,186	1,090,258	69.2
Employees	105,876	101,395	4.4
EBIT	€8.3b	€3.38b	145.6

BMW is today able to produce 69 percent more cars with the almost the same number of employees (+4.4 %) as in 2002. In 2002, the personnel expenses made up 15.6 percent of the revenue, last year only 11.5 percent. But the company pays significantly more than the relevant collective agreement demands. Every employee gets a so called "Erfolgsbeteiligung", aka. for a worker 2.5 additional monthly wages in 2012. It seems pretty silly, to on the one hand pay very well and on the other hand cry about high labor costs.This is actually true for most of the German car manufacturers; (even Daimler paid an additional €3,200 as "Erfolgsbeteiligung". )

So, in fact BMW is today a much more competitive company than it was 10 years ago. Labor costs are playing a significantly smaller role than they did in 2002, and a large chunk of those are voluntary payments, which would allow to cut these significantly in case of problems. With the new electric cars, which will most likely in the beginning not cannibalize other sales, and instead open new markets, this trend will probably continue (though revenue stagnated in 2013, while sales significantly increased).


I think the situation in Germany can be broken down to this:

• We see islands of astonishing productivity increases e.g. in parts of the German automotive industry.

• The situation at BASF (chemicals) is very similar. Employee expenses (€9.089 billion) are roundabout at the EBIT level (€8.976 billion). While in 2003 the situation was €2.658 billion EBIT to €5.891 billion employee expenses. In that time frame revenue increased from €33.3 billion to €78.7 billion (source pdf page 237). All that was done while only moderately increasing the workforce by 27 percent to 112,388. 

• At Daimler the picture is still looking a bit different. The firm has reduced its employee expenses from €24.7 billion after getting rid of Chrysler in 2005 to €18.0 billion and increased EBIT from €2.9 billion to €8.6 billion.

•  VW and Continental are competitive, but not at the above levels. VW had an operating margin of "only" 5.9 percent in the first 9 months of 2013.

• Opel/Vauxhall is struggling. GM lost around $200 million in the third quarter of 2013 in Europe.

• The German automotive industry produced 5.4 million cars domestically; and that was done with a total of only 743,000  employees plus 100,000 temporary and 250,000 contract workers.

• Other industrial firms that produce run-of-the-mill products like DC04 steel (pun intended) are  having problems remaining competitive, but this isn't just a labor cost problem. It is a combination of labor, almost no raw materials like coal and iron in Germany and relatively high energy costs.

• In part the collective agreements of the last decade were a compromise designed to keep the struggling firms competitive. It was a conscious decision on part of the the IG Metall (metal workers' union) to avoid real wage increases to help reduce the unemployment numbers.

• On the one hand, the talk about competitiveness bogus for many German firms. Some firms of the production industries are in a situation where 10 percent higher employee expenses means around 10 percent lower EBIT. Labor is becoming a less and less relevant factor overall through increasing revenue at almost constant real wages.

• On the other hand, many other companies, especially suppliers are not as profitable.

Something is wrong with the German brand of capitalism when we are seeing that the EBIT is at the level of labor costs for some companies. Such a system can clearly not function in the long term. One reason for this development is the German beggar thy neighbour policy of the last decade, which has not only lead to stagnating real wages and soaring corporate profits, but also to a divided labor market (over 30 percent of the workers in car manufacturing are "temporary"). Another reason is the extreme productivity increase in the last ten years. Germany clearly needs real wages that reflect this development. The voluntary "Erfolgsbeteiligung" that many firms pay is a move in the right direction, but the capitalist system can only function when productivity increases are reflected in the real wage increases, which is absolutely not the case.

Instead of the extremely shortsighted criticism that the CEOs offered I actually expect that they are able to demonstrate how their idea which is pretty much based on real wage stagnation is supposed to function. Less and less people are producing an ever larger number of products for the same amount of real money as they did in the 1990s. Guess what? In the end one will either have to go the US way of creating massive credit bubbles over and over again; or the European path of collapsing demand. In the end neither "solution" helps those firms or the German economy for that matter in the long run. We are facing an absolutely miserable "return on investment" on our trade surplus; and even the car sales in Germany are terrible; (though not as bad as in other European countries).

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*her "yellow press nickname" is actually "Mutti" (mum)