On April 9, 2012 at 23:48, Hasbeen said...
By your own admission you've heard stories that would make you not want to work in an auto plant, you've also admitted that it's tough, tedious work.
But it's not worth $20 per hr? I don't get it.
The very nature of an assembly line is so that a person doesn't need to know "everything" he needs to know "his" thing. So experience doesn't really matter when you're installing a new bumper on a car every 1.5 minutes for at least 8 hours per day.
Hi Honey what did you do today?
I put 350 bumpers on cars today.
70,000 bumpers in a year
1.75 million bumpers in a 25 year career.
You can share stories about the Steamfitters Union, but that sotry is playing out across the country right now, whether or not it's a union shop.
It might not be rocket surgery, but that's back breaking work.
If that's not worth $20 per hour what is?
With a job promising $20 an hour or more, the churn on employees was extremely high. The majority of people who got hired could not handle it.
Experience actually does matter even though the work is repetition. The minivan plant in Fenton spit out a van every 45 seconds. You aren't working on a stationary object either, it's in constant motion. Jobs were maxed out and even a minor screwup would put you "in the hole" and cause a cascade effect down the line since assembly is cumulative.
A huge part of the problem in Autoplants isn't the line worker churn but the engineer churn. There were no experienced engineers. Every new engineer thought they had a solution previously unthought of leading to the implementation of the same failed concepts over and over and over. All of which resulted in a depressing amount of wasted labor and resources.
During a retooling shutdown, a clever engineer decided that weatherstrips should be hung on a rack. Sliding door weatherstrips came in plastic containers with 35 weatherstrips per stacked 6 high. These were originally placed on pneumatic lifts. The engineers racks, although quite fancy and expensive were insufficient to bear the weight and didn't hold up long requiring constant repair.
The lunacy of the concept was that it now took a forklift driver extra time to bring material one box at a time (instead of a skid) and then unload the 35 weatherstrips individually and place them on the rack. The driver had to return every 25 minutes or so to restock (instead of once per shift) Further, material should be handled as little as possible. Any time you handle material you increase the probability for in system damage. Worse yet, the engineers design of the racks had all kind of sharp edges which led to tears and leaks in the water test. To meet the extra labor demand for the material handlers, they added an additional forklift driver to the section. The end result, more labor costs, more material costs, more defects. Yet, this engineer absolutely could not acknowledge the stupidity of it.
Last edited by Fiasco on April 10, 2012 02:46.
