When we initially flagged Rep. Mark Kirk’s misleading diatribe on the United Auto Workers, we focused our energy on deflating his claim that General Motors’ hourly labor cost was $78 per hour. But Kirk uttered a second deceptive allegation worth debunking during the same WLS interview. Listen here:

Internal mp3

KIRK: Under Chapter 11, you have a number of ways to restructure a company, because just giving a big bailout doesn’t handle a structural problem. When you have an hourly labor cost of $78 per hour at GM, where as Toyota has $35 …

ROMA: Yeah, that’s insane.

KIRK: It doesn’t matter how much taxpayer money you throw at the problem -- you’re still going to go under. When some employees have a right to 120 days of vacation time … I worry that unless properly structured, this is a bailout of the United Auto Workers, not General Motors.

One hundred and twenty days of paid leave per year is beyond excessive. But no UAW member is allotted that many days off. The union’s 2007 contract with General Motors provides its members 17 paid holidays, including a mandatory shutdown between Christmas and New Year’s Day. And if the GM contract is at all similar to the one the union signed with DaimlerChrysler a few years ago (PDF), a 45-year-old employee with 15 years experience would be granted 17.5 paid vacation days per year. (We’re waiting for confirmation from a UAW spokesperson and will update the post once we have it.)

While generous, 34.5 days of paid leave is nowhere near Kirk’s 120-day estimation. That’s because Kirk’s claim is deliberately vague. In an attempt to pin the blame for the auto industry’s struggles on labor, he appears to be conflating the total number of vacation days a worker accrues over the course of a union contract (usually 3-4 years) with the per-year allotment generally referenced. 

As Harold Meyerson wrote last week, it was the UAW who sounded the alarm way back in 1949 that new cars cost too much relative to the buying power of the American public, were oversized, and exhibited “appallingly low” fuel efficiency.

Now, with the UAW offering concessions as a way to sure up Congressional support for a Detroit bailout, it seems they are taking into account not only their members’ interests but those of the industry and the economy more broadly. Mark Kirk should do the same.