that money lines the pockets of the ceos... why lower the price of your product when people have been paying it for years? now that you can outsorce and get it made cheaper, why would you drop your price.. make more money that way.. thats my opinion of why the price doesnt drop... i make freaking $10 an hour.... ugh.. 42$/hour?
? cant imagine... yet my boss chargers 60$ an hour for inhouse labor, and 80$ for onsite... yet 10 goes to me... wtf is wrong with that picture?
EEEEEXXXXXXXXAAAAACCCCCTTTTTYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
While working for Chrysler for 9 plus years (as Supervision) for what reason I do not know they used to ram down our throats at meetings that the average cost of ALL the union labor to build car was 17% (Yup seventeen percent) of the cost of the car. The other 83% was split between materials and upper management salaries.
I was not supposed to but I saw a document that showed materails ranged from 20 to 22% of the cost. So basically do nothing, golf playing, taking trips on the company dolalr no good execs were dividing roughly almost 60% of the profits among themselves. (You can check with the shareholders. They were not getting much of that.) The top guys at the plants I worked in used to joke openly about the systems in place to make it look like materails cost was 50 percent and more so they could manipulate the profits into thier own pockets.
Now I aint saying Unions are perfect. The UAW slit its own throat. Its hard to feel bad for it. They protected complete garbage most of the time and now that garbage will not support them back.
If when the US auto makers were in thier hayday (heydey) the UAW would have allowed them to fire the SOB's who did not come to work or were lazy and did not do thier jobs right the automakers would have hired a new guy the next day who LOVED his new high paying job and made quality people wanted to buy. I bet today would be VERY different for the US carmakers if that was done.
But they protected GARBAGE workers. The good workers saw no reason to do thier work and the garbages and sadely we all suffer. I have seen good workers try to cover two jobs for lengths on end to make a good product because they care. But eventually the wind would move from thier sails and they would say "Screw it" and let it go. And I would not fire the bad apples as supervisor. So I may be the issue right? No I tried.
Where I worked the bad apples were nearly ALL on drugs. The Upper management SUPPLIED the drugs to them! (We called it the candy program)
Upper management actually did things to CAUSE more overtime cause the more they "worked" (meaning came to the place and lounged around) The more money they had to buy candy.
Lots of these guys were fork truck drivers (being it required little physical effort) and we processed engine blocks and needed forktrucks to drive in and pull pallets that were full out of the way and put down empty pallets for more blocks. In the cleaning room a good driver could literally do all the work he needed in 10-15 minutes and then take a break for the rest of that half hour then come out and catch up again WITHOUT stopping the lines (Which I had to account for ANY STOPPED time on my downtime) This one guy would dissappear for 45 minutes. Then show up and cry he needed help!
He NEVER answered his radio to me or the guy in charge of fork trucks.
One day we literally had the line stopped with loaded pallets EVERYWHERE. The whole palnt was breathig down my neck and I had been calling him on the radio for over 45 minutes (The only thing that saved me being non union was the fact that everyone heard me a zillion times. I was also walking all over heck trying to find him in break rooms and hidey holes) The Union steward and the acting plant management were right there when we found him.
He was sitting inbetween pallets of stacked blocks (stacked two high and taller than this forktruck as we did. But he had emptied out a hole in the middle of these blocks. Put TWO pallets of blocks on the forktruck tines and backed into the hole with the blocks in front of him. He was surround by tighly stacked engine blocks.
The ONLY reason I found him when I did was he was yelling at his girlfriend on his phone and I heard "talking/yelling engine blocks". Even though the union was there and the upper management was there and the cleaning room and the foundry had stopped he was simply told to go back in and go to work (Not by me I wanted him fired) I asked why and was told it was just what was going to happen and would be best to drop it. Then was told I NEEDED to account for this downtime by spreading it across other smaller things. Nice eh?
While he was trying to catch up this mess he rammed two building posts IN SIGHT of upper management and Union stewards and then starteted to yell and cuss at me and threatened to fight me (I am easily twice his size) when I asked to move a particular pallet next. I was later told by the only decent steward we had that this guy was coached by other stewards to start fights with supervisors (when in it deep) so that they could use that to get charges dropped agaisnt him in return for not demanding the supervisor be fired. They actually TOLD him to do this.
It gets better. Yah I know this is long but I could tell you about things like this that happened all day.
Due to that fact that he was a POS and I would not let him take 45 minute breaks an hour he complained about me and they transferred him to the Cupola (kupe-o-la) Thats where they melt iron or other such metals in a foundy.
(Side note: The guy they put in my area was FLABBERGASTED. He would cover my area. NEVER left me hanging not once even when he was ill and spending time in the bathroom with the trots) and even would help out in the adjacent area and shoot the shit with the truck drivers there. And he STILL took breaks that were well over twice what the job "allowed". He was amazed at how little he had to do. He LOVED it. So did all my floor people as he made there jobs go smoothly)
Anyways the wonderful first guy got put on the Cupola. The fork truck driver on that job is truely the least to do. But it IS SUPER important to be done PRONTO! (Can you see the time bomb here?)
The job he had was to empty the slag tubs. There are two. One on top of the other in a rack. They take the top one out and the molten slag (mostly melted sand that turned to cool glass globs and other crap that was mixed in with the melted metal till it hit the separator below the cupola) Anyways they swap the top tub outwhen it gets full. While the are putting a new tub in the top the bottom catches the overflow till the new tub is above it. The top gets changed between five and ten times a night depending on production rates and the amount of crap VS good metal being fed the Cupola. The bottom gets swapped whenever it nears full so its ready to catch more when the tops being changed.
So one night not three weeks after our little incident with him hiding in the blocks the guy in charge of the Cupola calls him on the radio and tells him the slag tub is full. The guy answers "OK, I'll be right there." He is supposed to check it on his own but does not. At this time he was sitting in the fork truck garage with six other people BSing. This particular night the Cupola had been down due to a mechanical issue they had juts got fixed and it had run the furnaces low on Iron being down and needed to catch up. During all that downtime the guy never changed the tub...
So a few minutes later the Cupola foreman calls him AGAIN and says This tub is FULL! We NEED you here NOW. The guy again replies, "Be right there" and continues BSing withthe other guys in the truck garage. Five minutes LATER the Foreman calls LOUDLY And says "The TUB IS RUNNING OVER"!!!! and it was nearly five minutes later when the driver finally showed up.
Now the top tub had vastly overfilled. Molten sand still glowing red (well over 3000 degrees. 3600 is common) was running down the back side of the tube and onto the floor and under bottom tub. The pool of glowing molten lava/sand had was two to three feet past the bottom tub. The guy drives his fork truck into this to try to get the top tub out......................
The Truck had oil leaking from the front hydraulics and had rubber tires. The whole front of the thing eruppted in flames. Being he had only dared to go a little ways in the forks were barly halfway under the tub anyways. The intense flames burned through the lift cylinder lines very quickly (in seconds) and the tub which he had raised over a foot easy dropped and fell over sideways to a 45 degree angle in the rack. In doing so it spilled about 1/3rd of its still molten contents agasit the back concrete wall which then gushed under the bottom tub and the forktruck PAST its rear tires. Now the back of it catches fire. (I wished to hell I had a camera for all of this. Trueley I do)
At this point he decides to give up the ship. He kicks out the rear window of the forktruck. Climbs out onto the counterweight and jumps for all he is worth (which aint much) to clear the molten slag below him. He is in such haste he nearly slips and he literally missed stepping in 2-3 inchs of moving slag by less than the length of his foot. Another couple seconds and he would not have been able too.
Now once this clusterfrack was noticed to be happening they have started to shut the cupola down. The slag pouring down from the separator stops after a bit and another truck driver from another part of the plant is brought in with the BIGGEST forktruck. Its massive in size and has super long huge tines and it can barely manuever in there but the driver is good and he actually lifts the now totally burned up fork truck out of the slag and moves it then while people spray the fork truck tires with fire extinguishers. He then uses that monster to somehow pry up the tipped molten tub of slag and get it out of there.
Being as stated above that we were low on iron and the cupola was trying to catch up then had to be shut down due to this we lost two hours of production (Due to running out of iron) and one forktruck.
The cost? The total for this downtime was just over $90,000.00. All beacuse he did not do his job nor come when CALLED. But instead sat talking about crap with buddies.
He was fired. Got called back three weeks later. Got PAID for the time out of the plant. Got NO letter in his envelope.
He DID loose his fork truck driving license though and had to do other work.
Glad he learned his lesson.
Thats a example of a bad union and give them there bad rep. Sadely it is all to common. But like most things a few bad apples ruin the whole bushel.
If those people were allowed to be delt with then we would be walking a quite different path in the USA today I bet.
Sorry for the book. It was still the condensed version.
