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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Alighieri who wrote (438715)	12/6/2008 11:12:03 AM
From: i-node	Respond to of 1574465

Chances are that these are payments that the company has to make to the pension and benefit funds to cover additional workers who join the retired pool. I doubt that they have added or accrued any new benefits negotiated by UAW...but I am not sure. These kinds of changes occur all the time. Contracts, or parts thereof, are modified to deal with special circumstances or new requirements. When this occurs, you can changes in the expense related to, for example, pensions (which are part of assembly labor), that must be made prospectively. When this happens they will flow through as increased direct labor costs in almost all circumstances. G&A is a period expense, below the GM line and a direct hit to PTI. Where else they could report it? G&A expense is always an "operating expense". However, "Rent" of a building is not necessarily G&A. It could be part of factory overhead or even part of direct costs in a sizable organization. GM's General Ledger likely has 100,000 or more accounts (a large corporation I worked for years ago had 300,00 G/L accounts) so there are plenty of places to put various expenses related to production. If an expense pertains directly to assembly costs, it is going to be inventoriable cost in the COGS section. This includes ANYTHING pertaining to assembly labor, might include rents, utilities costs, depreciation, almost anything. We included the cost of operating several shortline railroads (including depreciation) as part of cost of sales for a plywood plant and sawmill.