And this country is losing it an alarming rate.
Sure this meme is tongue in cheek, implying that the guy is about to go around some safety protocol but the underlying message is that he knows how things actually work.
The outfit I work at now and the last place I worked at, both being perfect examples of what I am driving at.
Out of all the maintenance people at both places, the youngest guy was fifty years old.
The last place, the oldest guy finally retired at 76!
For two years before he finally said Enough, I kept telling the managers that they needed to find some young guy and tether him to the hip of the old guy so he could save some of the knowledge the old dude had.
Over and over I warned them that the old guy knew that plant inside and out and when he left, all that knowledge was going to go with him.
This was a very specialized industry and no joke, it took YEARS to get even half way competent. High pressure gas systems, high voltage electrical systems, high heat/pressure vessels, all kinds of very dangerous equipment and very strict safety measures to keep form blowing the entire plant and a half square mile of neighborhood from getting blown to Smithereens.
Did they listen?
Hell no.
Even worse, when the Plandemic hit, they started whittling down their maintenance team. At the end when me and my biddy got shit canned, when we left, they had gone from 16 maintenance guys, down to 4.
You can not tell me that they weren’t pencil whipping all of the calibrations and required maintenance schedules at that point because we could barely keep up with all of it with 16 people. That plant was running 24/7 and now I believe they are down to 2 shifts Monday through Friday.
They literally had permanent job opening ads in several outlets and could not get anyone to even apply.
The outfit I work at now has the same aging maintenance team issues and they also refuse to see the writing on the wall.
I am the oldest of 3 guys. The next guy is 60 and the youngest is a guy I worked with at the other place. He is 50.
This place also runs 24/7, with just 3 guys on Dayshift to keep the joint running. They rely heavily on outside vendors and extra Millwrights when things break down.
Somehow they justify this great expense instead of hiring a full time guy to pick up the slack.
When I was first hired, it was with the expectation that I would move to Swing Shift after a few months and every once in a while they bring that up.
It isn’t safe for one guy to work by himself and they kinda know that if they split up the Dayshift crew they have now that they will be fucked.
But they still refuse to hire just one more guy.
I’m sure it’s like that all over this country and they are cutting their own throats over the cost of one guy’s salary and benefits, when they wind up paying six times that amount to outside help.
It’s hard for me to have any sympathy for this behavior and when I finally go, they are losing forty five years of mechanical repair experience. Apparently they think experienced maintenance people area dime a dozen.
The here and now reality is, all us old farts who have that experience are either retiring from the work force or are falling over dead and there isn’t anyone coming up behind us in large numbers.
The Airline industry and the Automotive industry are already suffering this shortage of experienced people and this DEI bullshit is already getting people killed.
Frankly, I don’t see any good solutions on the horizon.
I think the late, great George Carlin saw this coming a few decades ago and said it best,
They are getting exactly what they wanted and they are going to reap what they have sown.
Up here in Canada power engineers are broken into four classes, 1 through 4… with the fourth class being the least experienced, and the first being most experienced. Every one of my customers flat out REFUSED to write for their first class exams. The reason was that if you did – you got “promoted” and became responsible for the plant. If something blew up, a lot of it will inevitably come down on you…which was great for the company execs! They could starve the operating budgets, cut deep into manpower and dodge the blame if something bad happened.
When I was a kid we’d kill for one of those plant jobs. Nowadays…who would want them? Like – I’m going to go in cold, requiring your entire knowledge base…so that I can do the work of four other guys? That were probably equally as competent as you when they got shitcanned? And be responsible for whatever happens…? Fuck that…
Yep. Thirteen years ago, I was a field service tech for a cash-handling equipment company, (currency counters/sorters, coin wrappers, etc. in banks, vaults, casino count rooms, etc.)
There were three of us covering our territories, and we were barely keeping up. I was the youngest of the three at 59. We were telling management they needed to bring another tech onboard and start bringing him up to speed but their response was “Hire another tech? Nawww. Tighten screws on the ones we got.”
Then in the fall of 2011, I came down with a simultaneous diagnosis of prostate cancer and spinal cord tumors.
I quit my position and during turnover I offered the district manager a notebook of notes of the peculiarities of each machine in my terriitory. His response was, “Why notes? If you use the standard procedures, it shouldn’t matter which machine you’re working on.”
Ten days after I heard that, the notebook went into the fire.
Fuck ’em.
Not just the employers. One of our ex mechanics now in minneapolis pipefitters says few of the turnouts are able to sweat and braze proficiently, much less even recognize a chiller in a room full of sewing machines.
What is killing the West is not Capitalism, it is the greed of the Corporate Elites, period.
The Corporate Elites are looking to maximize profits at the expense of the Company’s (and I mean every business with a management separate from the administrative and worker base) profits – particularly if the company offers shares.
Today’s shareholders are the financial parasites, while the big executives are bloated locusts – not a single one of them has ANY interest in the longevity of the company beyond a few years.
If you observe, you will discover just how much of a rarity it is for any company to have and follow a ten-year, or even a decent five-year financial plan. Such plans include long-term arrangements for ensuring its survival – and when you observe an absence of younger employees receiving all of the essential training, you can guarantee the management has no interest in the company’s doors being open three days after the last retirement party.
It all trickles down from there.
Feature, not a bug
Tat’s what happens when you have “professional” managers. We are in the initial stages of what happened to KMart in Walmart for that very reason.
IN college they teach them they can manage anything when the basic principles are known. Were that the case, the old saying “short sleeves to shirt sleeves in 3 generations” would not be accurate. It took KMart less than that.
Stop complaining.
That one penny saved today may give your CEO his one million dollar bonus. That million dollar loss tomorrow? Who cares, he doesn’t have to give his last bonus back, so no problem.
And if the plant shuts down the CEO will be re-hired somewhere else bragging about the one penny he saved.
Concerned only about the numbers at end of the quarter and end of year profits. Worked for US Steel for 45 years, told my bosses same things. Was lucky enough to have a few bosses who listened. Trained one guy for two years to take my place doing controls, motor drives and PLC upgrades. Second guy, trained him for year and a half, then they closed the plant. US Steel for decades took the profits and ran, driving business into the ground. Those in maintenance having a portable craft were able to get jobs no problem, smart ones sold their house and moved out of California.
In 1997 I left my last corporate job as plant engineer due to the president of the division hiring my new maintenance employees. I needed 2 SKILLED guys, I got 2 trainee’s. One worked at a quick lube joint, the other loaded bombs onto planes in the Air Force. Both possibly trainable, neither with any relevant experience.
Since then, I’ve been the traveling millwright you spoke of. My self and a friend formed a company and have been working steady ever since, thanks to company’s NOT hiring good help. However I’m now in the process of retiring, I’m fixin to hit 67 years old, I’m wore out and tired. One bright spot is that there ARE more younger folks going into the trades. In the last 3 years we have hired 4 guys, all under the age of 30, 2 under the age of 25. They went to tech school instead of college and are making far more than their peers, and have no, or minimal, debt from loans to pay off. So there IS hope for the future, even tho I won’t be around to see it.
God Bless Mike Rowe
Amen to that.
What everyone else said
Zactly, my current closest friend retires at the end of October but all the while he has tried to pass on knowledge but I know the current work environment almost everywhere mostly perceives everything as just one more thing to do and it falls on deaf ears.
Not all but most, the hole he will leave is not insurmountable but it will take a special person to do it. I never was that guy all I knew was to work my ass off and try to be more like him and others.
ps They to would not hire a shadow before he leaves.
Older folks make more money, and it’s well deserved for their years of experience. Unfortunately, the new management theories have a contradictory opinion. With the fact younger folks can’t be trusted to be given the responsibilities they can’t handle, and the cost to allow them to make expensive mistakes looks terrible on the bottom dollar, the solution is to increase the work load on the experienced employees, with the hope ignoring the consequences will not be their problem. Their goal is to increase their salaries, add experience to their resume, and keep moving up the corporate ladder to the point even mistakes are rewarded with salary contractual obligations.
The logging contactor I last worked for, the largest in NorCal, had a “You WILL NOT miss work” policy. It was right there in the employee handbook a guy received when he first started working with the company. Since I could not only run most of the equipment, had a class A drivers license and could not only wench and weld I asked one of the three owners of the company if they had ever considered creating a ‘Handyman’ position, so a guy like me could fill in wherever needed so crews didn’t have to run shorthanded. I thought it was a fine idea and might actually improve safety. My idea fell on completely deaf ears, even though in most cases I’d be paid to replace a guy that needed to take a day off even though he wouldn’t be paid for that day off. Then there’s the fact that a guy would often be forced into working when he was sick as a dog and when forced to work he was binging his illness to the entire crew. I myself did that more than once.
The funny thing was that whenever a foreman needed to take a day off he took it. And these were the same people telling their men that they couldn’t do the same because “we can’t afford to do without you”.
Like Rickn8or above, two days after I was fully vested in the company’s retirement plan I “burned my notebook”.
The airline I wrench for is hiring apprentice guys with no experience or certifications or guys right out of A&P school who just learned the tests. I’m the 2nd oldest guy in the maintenance dept and have the most years of experience; 46 of ‘em. I’m stepping out in October and all that’s going along. I try to teach, coach, mentor & just keep the kids kids from killing someone but they flat don’t want to learn. They already know it all and I should just go away. People are going to die.
As I recall, Cessna was using people with no experience on the assembly line, with AMT’s as supervisors, in the late 90’s when they re-started production.
If the new Caravan is any indication, they still are.
it takes 2 maintenance people to do a job. 2 to make the repair, one to open the valves and one to watch for leaks until they can prove the repair. i did mechanical contracting repair for 30 yrs. you can’t open a valve in the basement and watch a repair on the 20th floor at the same time. elevators seem to slow down drastically at that time.
What’s that saying about the 4 generations? The guys who designed and built it, the guys who learned from them who can run it and maintain it, then the guys who learned from then who can run it, etc.?
Can’t find it, but it was a good one.
But this shit is endemic. I ain’t looking forward to those inevitable health issues when I end up having to deal with them.
1st generation builds the company, 2nd generation grows the company, and the 3rd generation runs it into the ground. It really does happen. The grandson with the silver spoon, convinced he knows everything. Few private companies survive it.
I always heard it, first builds it, second exploits it, third pisses it away.
That is the path my last employer is on, since I retired/left the rich kid grand son is the production manager, bwahahaha. The production manager when I left was about half worthless so it’s not an improvement.
I was the last mainframe programmer at a life insurance company maintaining unimportant functionality like disability and life claim check generation. Management, as you all will not be surprised to hear, didn’t want to train a backup because COBOL and JCL is obsolete and anyway that process never failed. It never seems to have crossed their minds that the reason it never failed is that the person maintaining it also wrote it and literally had been working longer than IT other employees have been alive.
I had enough at 62 and retired. That lasted for ONE day. Evidently management ‘suddenly’ realized that the corporate claims payment expertise was working out the door. They then had me in meetings eight hours a day for a month trying to have me tell said youngsters how the systems worked. Was rather funny. They hired me back as a consultant for what was to be three months to continue the training but turned out to be three years. I made more money working half time in those years than I did full time as an employee. Combined with my pension, life was good! The day after I truly retired as the company president saw me still there and told IT to finally end my contract, there was a major production outage and they had the gall to call and ask me to resolve it!
I read and truly appreciated the points of everyone above, and I see it all through the Lens I’ve been seeing Management operating under, Short Term Profits being more important than less profit Today in order to safeguard the ongoing success of the company into the future. But THIS,, this last statement is just so telling. The blind arrogance, the inability to even consider the possibility that the Overarching theory of
How to run a business
Just Might be a little short sighted,, and finding themselves in This position didn’t open their eyes…
The day after I truly retired as the company president saw me still there and told IT to finally end my contract, there was a major production outage and they had the gall to call and ask me to resolve it!
And you Know that wasn’t treated as the WakeUp call that it should have been.
I didn’t used to really have anything against the unreachable and unteachable,, until it became obvious that there are so many and in places where Their blind ignorance and arrogance is wrecking America. Now I just despise the bastards.
“The day after I truly retired as the company president saw me still there and told IT to finally end my contract, there was a major production outage and they had the gall to call and ask me to resolve it!”
I’d have bent those bastards over so hard their grandchildren would feel it.
Sure, I’ll come take a look at it. $500 an hour, 4 hour minimum.
COBOL will never die. Wrote it in a couple of early jobs, but never learned CICS. It’s the only language I’ve encountered that has a decimal number data type. Geez, I wonder how man PIC definitions I’ve typed. No don’t try to tell me that a floating point is the same, because it isn’t. And it isn’t quite correct to say that SQL has fixed decimal syntax, because that’s a function of the database.
Anyway, what a memory (core).
I was (briefly) considering coming out of retirement to do some COBOL (and JCL!) programming.
Then I got sober and wondered, “What was I thinking!!
Good times, back in the 60’s !!
Been in the same Maintenance shoes as you described. Except I had both responsibilities of Mechanical and Electronics in my plant. Worked on Industrial Automation, PLCs, Machine Vision, and Fanuc robots as well as operating Machining equipment and manufacturing Semiconductors. They kept bringing in newbies and fired most of them within 4 weeks due to incompetence or lying on their experience. Most were lazy and downright dangerous to be around. I have seen “mechanics” who have never used a drill or whose experience was limited to assembling bikes at a dollar store. Not good when dealing with robots that can take your head off in a split second.
The second my contract was up, I left the plant as I could see the writing on the wall and the stuff hit the fan within 2 months. When the Plandemic hit, all Maintenance budgets were terminated and experienced people let go.I was one of those and never found a decent company afterwards. It was the saddest mess I have ever seen.
I took early retirement and got out the industries. I get headhunter offers from all over the country for several industries I have worked in but I am not interested in the corporate politics and budget wars anymore. I am ready to buy some machine shop tooling & machines and do my own thing. I miss many of my good friends I worked with but they are doing the same thing I am, with no regrets.
I think you found a buddy in Phil…
It’s happening in healthcare too. I had to spend 5 years in ICU before the ER manager would even consider taking me. Now they’re bringing in sassy 20-year-olds and putting them in the charge nurse position. Nobody has an effing clue what they’re doing. Same goes for RT, plant ops, all of it.
I’m really missing the ER, but despise the corporation.
It was 8 years of nursing, a Bachelors degree and a short term assistant charge nurse before I was named as a charge nurse on the advanced Med/Surg unit(one step below ICU.) After I got my Masters they wanted to promote me to a nurse manager and I turned them down, several times. You think politics is nasty on the floors, upper admin areas were brutal. I would not have lasted a month in a NM position as I would have told them how to fornicate in 18 different ways…
Yes, you are correct. I took an administrative officer position for a hot minute. On top of DON demanding understaffing to unsafe levels to save money, it was a mean girls club on steroids. Went back to bedside after six months.
It’s a good feeling though, when some young guy with talent that you spent time training calls (or texts) for advice on solving a novel problem. Makes up for a lot of the stupid you put up with for years. I never minded sharing my knowledge or experience with those that were serious about learning the trade ,and more importantly, learning to think. (Chief Engineer, Merchant Marine).
Libertarians get it wrong when they believe work is about producing the most for the least. “Work” is mostly about creating an opportunity for everyone to compete in the pecking order, and production is job number eight after cheating and stealing. If Americans ever threw off the red tape and just produced they would discover they were almost independently wealthy, and barely had to work to produce a lifestyle with flush toilets, automobiles, and fresh fruit in December. Too bad that Americans have domesticated themselves, and believe it right and proper to be the tax cattle of the nobility.
Preachin’ to the choir, brother.
I’m in a specialised side of trucking, carrying bulk goods made in our own mills in our own specialised trucks..
The new management (sadly like all other truck operators) continue to deskill the industry and then wonder why they can’t get ‘quality’ skilled staff, they seriously believe they can get good staff ten a penny.
They’ve also taken the premium well paid shifts out of the equation so when i and others with 40+ years behind us kick the bucket no one can step into our shoes, because lower salaries as well as anti social shifts is bound to attract the remaining quality applicants apparently.
Thing is damage to our equipment is expensive, a small dent in a pressurised road tanker is in the region of £10,000 and 8 weeks off the road to fix, which can be just a fraction of the costs when the shall we say less skilled (and couldn’t give a fuck anyway) crew cause problems at a customer’s premises.
I’ve been in this game nearly 50 years now and this scene just keeps repeating itself.
Its not just my particular industry, this crap is everywhere, the answer appears to be more managers.
You can’t just grab some bod off the street train him/her for 3 weeks and hey presto you’ve got 2 millions miles worth or 20 years of knowledge.
Near as I can tell, that’s swept the whole country and there is no going back now. We’re fooked.
If it wasn’t for bad management I would probably still be working instead of retiring. Read somewhere (here??) that workers don’t leave jobs, they leave management.
Yes, they leave management.
Worked at a shop that for any mechanic was a dream to be in. All the best equipment to work with and all the extra training you could ever want to take. The owner treated me very well, just didn’t treat a few of the others very good. Got tired of watching him berate the apprentices in front of everyone else and belittle a couple of the other Journeymen around me – and not once asked myself or any of the senior guys to walk them through a procedure.
My better half was there one day and witnessed an “event.” We moved two weeks later.
You guys are correct. I learned to fix cars starting at 6 from my dad. Navy paid for college and I got commissioned. I was a nuke and had enlisted guys smarter than me “working” for me. I was able to learn a lot, but I especially learned how important skill and knowledge of my people was to running in good order.
Advance a few years as a civilian, got an MBA and started the corporate thing. First is Pournelle’s iron law. Second, all senior management are accountants; they can’t put their kids’ bicycles together, can’t change a car battery or tire, etc. Because they have no skills, they don’t know what they don’t know. I read somewhere that businesses succeed because employees do things that management doesn’t even know about. So much truth to that statement.
It is all about the dollar and the annual report, not taking care of the customer and certainly not taking care of the employee. training is expensive and it is cut. Mentoring is training, two people doing the job of one (sarcasm meter should be pegged high). The details matter. I had executives tell me I couldn’t see the big picture because I was too wrapped up in the details. The big picture is made of details. It is not the law of unintended consequences when one of those details bites you on the ass, it is the law of “this is a feature of the system in which you work.”
I never got higher than middle management. I listened to the experienced employees and tried to take care of customers, not the executives.
After I left corporate, I worked in a big box store for a while. HR policies really are getting to be anti-employee. No one seems to understand if you treat your employees like shit, they will return the behavior. I provided management at big box an economic analysis to show how at 16 and minimum wage my wages had more buying power than today, regardless of what the CPI shows. Feed people bananas and you get monkeys.
Just saying.
After 29 years was let go because “covid.” I was the innovation engine of the company (6 times as many patents as the rest of the department). My last three were issued after I was separated. My down fall was not being cordial to the troglodytes but they paid me extremely well for when I was there. Saved a metric fuck-ton of my wages to have FU money. Greatest feeling in the world.
I have a phone interview tomorrow with a headhunter looking for talent in the little niche world I worked in. I’m only doing it to see if it is my old company. The worm always turns.
Spin
Keep us (okay, ME) posted on that, wouldja?
Inquisitive idiots wanna know…
I work for a large manufacturing company, family owned, been in business since 1920. The same family has owned it and operated it that entire time and it was the premier place in town to work. Starting 20 years ago the family stepped back from actively running things and the company morphed from caring about the employees to caring about the bottom line. Everything that pops into your head when that change happens did happen; Lesser pay, weaker benefits, weaker retirement, less care about the employee, etc.
Touching on Phil’s comment about experience, in about 2 years there is going to be a reckoning due to the senior maintenance guys retiring. If leadership had 2 brain cells to rub together they’d stick some of the younger guys with the seniors, especially the one that runs the machine shop.
Dirty Dingus McGee talked about forming his own business with a buddy and contracting out. These days that’s where the money in manufacturing is. We have a handful of contractors we work with and they constantly have crews out here doing something or other. As one of the foreman put it to me, “I don’t have idle people.”
I’m a 45 year Master Automotive Technician and have had this conversation more than once. Not many youngsters that want to grow REAL skills getting in the field. I said to hell with it a few years ago and stick to building hot rods. The money is slow – but good – and I don’t work on anything I don’t want to. Best part; I keep it small, I keep it all.
If my health returns, I will be doing the same thing. Just need my back to improve enough to not walk like I have shit my pants.