IIT Automotive Sees Falling Wage Rates

1 November 1996

REUTERS reports that at the Automotive Industries' Executive Management Conference, a top executive at IIT Automotive Inc. reports that its 35,000 workers worldwide will be paid combined hourly wages and benefits of less than $10 an hour by the year 2000.

Timothy Leuliette, president and CEO of IIT, said that IIT paid less than $10 an hour to ten percent of its employees in 1990, and to fifteen percent in 1995. Leuliette cites the need for auto suppliers to lower prices in the fast-changing industry, and maintains that ``we have to promise our customers a 3--4 percent price reduction.''

Leuliette participated in a panel discussion with chairman, president, and CEO Robert Oswald of Robert Bosch Corporation's U.S. automotive unit; and J. T. Battenberg III, president of General Motors Corporation's Delphi Automotive Systems.

Battenberg stated that suppliers should focus on new product areas, continuously stress quality, and that suppliers could expand more efficiently by pursuing international alliances; and Oswald emphasized that his company's performance as a supplier ``is not based just on innovation, but also that [they] are meticulous in bringing that innovation to production''.

Leuilette also said that in the year 2000, IIT's suppliers should expect to receive 80 percent of what they are paid for their products now, and that in order to maintain their present level of employees, firms need between eight and nine percent productivity growth.

The Auto Channel