Car manufacturers such as Tesla who pay their employeees twice as much as the unionized factories and award them also equity options
Gee, since you underlined it, I'd like to believe that's true. But underlining and screen shots from somewhere, for some jobs, don't really convince me.
When comparing union to nonunion pay, we really should be comparing frontline assembly workers. They're the "auto workers" in the United Auto Workers bargaining agreements. The degreed or licensed professionals in other fields that have been hired to work
in the auto industry aren't really the "domestic assembly" part of the equation.
Let's look at one difference between say nonunion Tesla and unionized GM. You highlighted
half of one difference—Tesla offering incentives in stock options to employees. According to
one recent article:
"At lower pay levels in the company, employees are also benefiting, but to a much lower degree. According to sources talking to Electrek, most new hires are given between $20,000 and $40,000 of restricted stocks that vest over three years, starting a year after they start working at Tesla". That's a welcome bonus to get for an assembly line worker. Like some other startups, Tesla hasn't had any annual profit to share in the decade leading up to their first ever annual profit last year, stock is what they have had available to work with in giving incentives. There just isn't any cash for bonuses when you're losing money each year, over ten years, and are relying on borrowing and selling stock to investors to continue from year to year.
The
other half of the incentive question is what the UAW negotiated several years ago for every full-time GM assembly worker—which is profit sharing. Their approach was that if workers were going to have to take pay cuts in order to rebuild and restore profitability to GM and other auto manufacturers—the workers should share in the reward and profits. The deal they negotiated was a $1,000 dollar annual cash bonus to each full-time hourly worker for every $1 billion dollars in net profit for the company. Over the past several years, that's meant an annual bonus of $8,000 to $12,000 in cash to each worker.
The obvious advantage to workers is that they choose how to invest or spend their cash bonus—maybe they'll buy Tesla stock with it; or put it in a college or retirement fund; whatever they decide to do. Another advantage of cash bonuses is that they are not tied to the whims of Wall Street fluctuations. There is also an incentive for productivity and efficiency as the workers share in the resulting profits.
