LMCane said:
I saw on CNBC that the AVERAGE pay of those striking UAW workers is nearly $140,000 a year
for working in a car factory!!!
and demanding a 16% pay raise!!
WTF
I worked in Michigan for about 18 months back in the 90s and the UAW workers are the most overpaid workforce I have ever seen. Most of them spend their whole lives doing jobs that high school kids could do well with a few days or a couple weeks of training. They get guaranteed raises for no added benefit to the company, they get more holidays, better benefits, and much higher pay than any other job with similar skill/knowledge requirements. And yet they are ALWAYS unhappy and are convinced they are constantly getting screwed by management.
It is an absolutely poisonous environment 100% created by union leadership, where the people working in the plant are encouraged to absolutely despise their managers and to be intransigent and unwilling to be flexible to get the job done or improve production in any way without written concessions granted by management.
I was friends with an engineer for Ford who worked on their Lincoln Town Car/Ford LTD products coming out of the Wixom plant. They had some issue occurring during the manufacture of the cars that left a small amount of water in the water pumps of the cars as they came off the line. It was easily fixable by letting the cars idle for about 10 minutes after they rolled off the line to cook out the water. If it was left there and the temp on the lot dropped below freezing, the water pump would crack. What the engineers asked the plant to do was leave each car running when it was parked after coming off the line, while the driver went back to get the next car. When they parked the next car next to it, they would shut off the first one. It was at most a one year problem that would be fixed during the prep for the next model year's production. The UAW refused to do it and demanded 5 new permanent full time positions be created to perform the requested task. Instead, Ford had to send their engineers over to the plant on a rotating schedule whenever it got below freezing to walk around starting the cars to keep them from freezing. And the union guys made sure the keys were always missing from a few, only to be found somewhere that required a long walk from the lot.