Thanks UAW...

[billvon 2,400]

>Bill, sometimes the "evil pigs" perspective, although dramatized and
>exaggerated, isn't all that far from the truth.

Agreed. There are indeed some evil people, managers, employees and companies out there. There are evil, lazy employees who somehow manage to hold on to their jobs through fraud and misrepresentation of their productivity. Your grossly overweight and incompetent co-worker comes to mind. Unions often make it difficult to fire such people, which is unfortunate; others are then saddled with his deficiencies.

And there are evil companies who mistreat their employees. Your story is a good example of that, and the best approach to them is to do what you did - leave and go somewhere where you are treated better. If everyone followed your lead, the company who treated people poorly would end up with nothing but the dead weight, and eventually collapse of their own accord. Thus the better companies survive and prosper, and the poor ones are weeded out.

However, for this to happen, the better workers need to find the courage to leave. It's not always easy, and indeed in bad economic times, it may not even be possible if one wishes to keep living in his home, affording needed medical care etc. Thus in many ways the company has more control than the employees, and is held to a higher level of accountability for this reason. OSHA, overtime limitations, whistleblower protection programs etc attempt to deal with this disparity.

But in the end the very best way to deal with companies who take advantage of their employees is to do what you did - move on to a company that treats them better. Companies end up with the employees they deserve - and vice versa.

[skydivr 0]

2 Questions:

Was Osram a union shop?

Was the semiconductor company?

Bet I know the answer

A lot of times, the Unions have created such an adversarial and toxic relationship with management that it eventually dooms the company or sets up a system that you experienced at Osram.

The company has a moral obligation, which many companies live up to, to be decent to their employees. Those employees have an obligation to help their employer make money. When this symbiotic relationship fails (and the injection of a Union is usually the cause), then the business ultimately fails too.

And the government want to impose 'card check' - give me a freakin break. Talk about a union intimidation tool...

Keith Abner
D-17590

"Those who do, can't explain; those who don't, can't understand"

[lurch 0]

No offense Divr, but betcha don't, actually.
Neither was a union shop. Osram got that way all by themselves.

I was told that much of the system failure at Osram was due to excessive management deadweight. Bored authority with a stick starts looking for excuses to use that stick to justify their presence, get to feel like they're doing something useful, make themselves believe they're performing a necessary function.

There are subtle cultural influences involved. Osram is german owned and there was a heavy german cultural influence on the way the place was run. Half the controls on the machines were in german. I don't have a particular problem with germans or Germany but there is a very distinct flavor to german culture. Exaggerated to a stereotype, that culture is very rigid. They like everything in order... their order. They're big on permits, bureaucracy and rules for the sake of having rules to follow, and to impose on others. Top-down control of everything.

With no checks on that philosophy and a management style imposed from above whose -only- goal was to extract as much possible cash out of the machine (for the entire plant is really just one big machine) as possible before HID lights lose the streetlight market to LEDS, that vague cultural tendency ran amok to the point of being a ridiculously exaggerated caricature of the base culture.

You do NOTHING without permission there. Working for Thermo I had a free hand to tweak or modify damn near anything I felt like provided I followed 3 basic rules which I pretty much wrote myself:

1: follow industrial standards of construction: Fuses and circuit breakers. No duct tape, no electrical tape.

2: don't do stuff that alters the process or product.

and 3: when in doubt, consult my manager... who was a cool guy with whom I worked on many projects.

At Osram the simplest change to add, say, an optic triggered airgun bracket on a sticky infeed chute required feasibility studies, Engineering has to do lots of studies, make proposals, formally create a procedure to decide which proposal is the most logical and economical and in line with the longer term management goals for that machine, gotta create blueprints and submit em for approval by Osram High Command, anything electrical gets passed to the Electricians who must then have more engineers design the addition to the machine and interface with Mechanical Engineering to build it and tie in to the existing hardware...

So major problems never get fixed. Mechanics are not allowed to fix them. Only to perpetually unjam the rail.
And their idea of "proper" is, the act of fixing things like this must take months, it must involve a great deal of procedure, and it must be very expensive while simultaneously being as cheap as possible.

Whereas, at Thermo, as soon as I'd identified the need for pulsed air based on parts presence at a given location, I'd say "Hey Boss, mind if I add an airgun to that sticky link rail on the o-ring infeed? Figure I'll give it an optic pickup, pop it loose every time we get a bad batch of O-rings and one stays hung there. Think I can do it mostly out of spares stock, might need to order some air line and bits, few hundred bucks max, no other effect on the machine, set it small enough so it can't affect the parts or put dings on em or anything. How bout it?"

Boss says "Ok give it a try, I wanna see it before you fire it up."
Prototype is assembled of industry standard compatible parts and being tested within a couple hours, by the end of the same day I've drilled tapped and dressed up the hardware and made the mod permanent. Doing all the electrical, mechanical and pneumatics myself. Problem is solved.

At Thermo they grew to rely on me generating "instant machinery" on request. I didn't have to worry about whether I was "allowed" to do anything. It was "Use your own judgement." At Osram, anything not compulsory was forbidden, and failure to comply with compulsory was, of course, heavily punished.

I still tend to agree with your attitude toward unions... I've never worked a Union shop. I don't want to. I've interviewed at several, and they came off like Osram. All kinds of things you're not allowed to do because thats the engineers job or the electricians job or the plumbers job or the facilities guy's job.

My new place, the only barrier I've run into was proposing to create a new loading fixture. We do a lot of aerospace, defence and medical. Once a process, no matter how crude, has been established for in-spec production of a product, and approved and formalized, nothing can be changed about the way it is being done, for fear of introducing unnoticed variables and subtle, long term product quality variations.

I can understand that and work around it, respecting the formalities that DO exist. This job has the most variety of any job I've held yet. I do everything electrical except major revisions to building power. For THAT they will employ an electrician. But I do lights, plumbing, robotics, anything and everything mechanical, furniture, pneumatics, troubleshooting of any kind... near-total freedom. I've got the run of the place. As soon as my supervisor got the idea that I was casually capable of all this they just cut my leash set me loose and got out of my way. I'd take this over some tightly defined union job any day.

Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

[Belgian_Draft 0]

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How is this the Union's fault?

Many of the suppliers are non-union. The UAW has a hissy fit whenever an automaker buys from a non-union supplier. They would NEVER allow them to operate in the same building.
The time is long past for the unions to scale back to looking out for worker health, safety, and reasonable wages and stop telling the companies who they can and can't do business with.

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I operated a Genesis Fanuc Arcmate robotic welder

Congratulations. An average person with a high school education can be taught, in less than a month, to assemble, setup, and operate an ArcMate. It isn't that difficult. Maybe there some other reason you were among the highest paid?

HAMMER:
Originally employed as a weapon of war, the hammer nowadays is used as a
kind of divining rod to locate the most expensive parts adjacent the
object we are trying to hit.

[DaVinci 0]

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How is this the Union's fault?

Artificially inflating wages beyond the point that allows the end product to be sold for a profit. This results in cost cutting in other areas.... Like GM did and the Govt had to bail them out.

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I operated a Genesis Fanuc Arcmate robotic welder and was amongst the highest paid in the plant. My job was going to a foreigner who was going to make around $1.30 per hour, compared to my $19.75 per hour. Needless to say, I didn't show the guy I was to train anything that he could use. Why should I? To Hell with him and Ingersoll. I could not care less that he was going back to Mexico without the knowledge to run the robot.

It seems the Union didn't really help you... So why are you defending them so much?