First of all in the manufacturing business it's very common for manufacturers to hire a bunch of people during the busy season and then lay them off during the slow season. Similar to how a lot of retailers hire temporary workers during the Christmas season... anyways, that's what the job bank is about. And yes it's a horrible idea but there's about 3k workers in the job bank right now which sounds like a lot but really it's a tiny fraction of auto workers. Yes what remains of it needs to be gotten rid of, but don't be fooled into thinking that this is a major issue for GM. It's a drop in the bucket.
As for the UAW salaries it is true that they're generally higher than their non-unionized counterparts but they're not an order of magnitude higher.
The biggest problem for the big 3, by far, in relation to the UAW is actually a complex combination of events. You see, the big 3 have been around a long time. They've been around since long before the ERISA in 1974, which were the laws which basically created the idea of the 401k and company match. Before then, it was all pensions. In 1974, GM, for instance, had something like 50% (not sure what it really was, but it was crazy high) of the auto market in the US. Now they have only 20% of the auto market. Couple that with advancing technologies and the number of people on the ground required to make vehicles at GM has gone down significantly. GM has 4 times as many pensioners living today than they have workers remaining. Not only that, but the healthcare costs for those pensioners has grown exponentially over the past decade. Now, Honda, Nissan, and Toyota do not have that kind of baggage because they did not really pick up market share in the US until after the ERISA laws came into play. That's where the propagandized figure of $70/hr average for GM workers that you may have heard. The UAW workers aren't seeing anything close to that money. That number is derived by taking the total amount being paid to current workers plus the total being paid to pensioners and dividing by only the current workers. Essentially I'm just making this point to reaffirm my previous statement that UAW workers don't make an order of magnitude more than the other guys.
So we have this weird problem caused by a historical change to the way we handled retirement 34 years ago. When and if the big 3 go down the first thing they'll do in bankruptcy court is absolve themselves of those pensions... which is good for GM et. al because that's where a lot of their big problems come from. This is REALLY REALLY BAD for the people because to put it into modern terms (under the new retirement plan paradigm) it would be as if your employer came back to you 20 years later and took every cent of company match plus any earnings you got off that company match back out of your 401k.
I wish I had a solution, but I don't. Frankly in my opinion someone's going to get caught holding the bag on this and in a completely unabashedly selfish fashion I'm just hoping it's someone besides me. But I think we all know that the government is going to pay whatever it takes to 'fix' this which means we'll all lose out either in taxes or more likely dollar devaluation.