Sociology > Education > Why some Americans ARE losing their jobs, and why I have no sympathy for them whatsoever... [Re: The Real Unemployment Rate-23%]
| Topic: |
Sociology > Education |
| User: |
"Stan de SD" |
| Date: |
19 Mar 2006 02:47:19 AM |
| Object: |
Why some Americans ARE losing their jobs, and why I have no sympathy for them whatsoever... [Re: The Real Unemployment Rate-23%] |
"Marinus van der Lubbe" <mvdl@reichstagsbund.de> wrote in message
news:121ppttpurpele2@corp.supernews.com...
salad wrote:
E A R T H L I N G wrote:
The Real Unemployment Rate is 23%:
How and Why Jobs are Vanishing from America
Jobs are vanishing from America. Many of us realize this from our
personal experience, or that of family members or friends.
The rate will lower as the baby boomers retire. There will be a worker
shortage then.
Could you use sarcasm tags. Five years of Bush Regime lies has destroyed
my
ability to detect sarcasm.
There is no reason to believe that a large unemployable sector of the
population guarantees employment, especially employment into jobs that pay
a living wage. Not only are factory and technical jobs leaving, but
service
jobs too. Plus you keep hearing stories of replacing workers in positions
that normally one would never think could be removed.
McDonalds Outsourcing Drive Through Order Takers
http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/38901
The future of American workers is grim.
Well, it would help if certain American workers would get off their asses
and learn new skills while they still have a chance. I work as a consultant
in the high-tech manufacturing industries, and one of my jobs is to provide
training in various manufacturing processes for companies that have
equipment and/or process issues in the manufacturing of semiconductor, MEMS,
memory disk, and photonics devices. Many American workers have an
entitlement mentality that is as bad as the EU-crybabies, and an almost
pathological phobia to educating themselves and learning new skills. In my
experience, I find I have the most success in training workers with some
college background, some level of mechanical proficiency, and curiously with
those being employed only a short time in their current position. I also
find that recent immigrants from Asia and people fresh out of the military
are reasonably easy to train, as they have both a greater degree of
motivation and comfort in dealing with changing surroundings (the US
military doesn't allow you to sit around in one spot for too long). My WORST
training experiences tend to be with older workers who have been with a
company for 10 or more years, and those who have never had more than 1 or 2
jobs in their lives. These people usually have a limited amount of
experience, have only seen things from one perspective, and think they "know
it all" - they decide that they don't need anyone coming in from the outside
to help them, and tend to spend an inordinate amount of effort fighting any
effort to introduce any type of training that would help them become more
productive and improve their own personal job security.
The ironic thing about American manufacturing is that it tends to attract in
many ways a group of people who are completely resistant to change in any
form. Unfortunately, their inability to deal with even a small amount of
change eventually subjects them to a larger, more tramautic degree of
change - that of losing their own jobs. There is one company in Southern
California where I have done consulting and training on and off for the last
2 years, and where the lower management and rank-and-file has fought any
effort to provide any training and implement any new procedures. This
company is staffed by individuals with little or no formal education past
high school, who think the solution to everything is to hit it with a bigger
hammer. They can't compete with their Asian competitors, but it's not
because of the salaries, as labor isn't the major share of cost in the
manufacturing of this particular specialty product. They can't compete
because industry standards have tightened up so much over the last decade
that the crap that they pumped out that was acceptable in 1995 no longer can
be qualified for the newest technology. However, these people are so
insulated from reality that they think they can perform at the same low
level and not learn anything new.
I'll give you an example of the type of stuff I encounter on a regular
basis: one of this company's products is basically a high-tech sintered
metal widget used as a heat sink in some specialized defense application.
This part is pressed, then has to be finished to meet certain flatness,
parallelism, and bow/warp specs on a double-sided lapping machine. In the
last 10 years the industry flatness spec has tightened up from 20 to 5
microns, so they find they can't make product to spec any more. Turns out
that the people running the equipment have never had any formal training or
explanation on how the equipment works, so they just dropped the machines on
the floor when they purchased them, wired them up, plugged in some numbers
for the verious settings and started running. That was good enough then, but
not now - so here's where I come in. One of the VPs from the parent company
get a referral from another customer of mine, so they call me in, and I
provide a quote for my services. The first time I come in, the "supervisor"
(some kid who claimed to learn everthing he knew about manufacturing from
working at Daddy's company) clearly has no technical grounding of the
equipment, gets panicky when I start asking him questions he doesn't
understand, and campaigns to get me canned after about 3 days of work.
Another consultant with the same company, who actually used to be my boss at
another job year ago, pulls me aside and says that the people there aren't
especially receptive to change, and that egos among the senior people are
easily bruised when someone comes along who may know more in a certain area
than they do. Fair enough, it's the company's call - I get my pay and move
on to the next job.
Fast forward a year later, and the same company calls me back in. Seems they
got fed up with Mr. Know-it-all, who apparently destroyed $60-70K worth of
prototype samples one day because the machine wasn't working correctly (I
had tried to explain the issue to him, but he couldn't be bothered to
learn). The old president is canned, a new management team is called in, and
they decide to give me another shot. I explain to them that this will be a
3-week process to evaluate/repair the equipment as necessary, train the
operations personnel, and run some basic process tests. The CEO and VP agree
to it, cut me a check, and schedule me to come in to work the following
week. I meet with the people I will be training, explain that I'm there to
work with them and help them, and give them an idea of what we be doing and
learning TOGETHER over the next few weeks (I am a hands-on type engineer - I
roll up my sleeeves and do the dirty work with everyone else). The actual
tool operator is receptive and willing to learn, however the rest of the
factory immediately starts playing obstructionist in an effort to fight my
progress.
In order to meet the specs demanded by my customer, I needed to make sure
that the tool was set up properly. That includes making sure that it is
sitting level on the manufacturing floor, that the profile of the lapping
plates are within certain specifications, that the speeds and pressured
indicated by the settings are accurate and repeatable. We also need to keep
this particular equipment clean in order to avoid scratching and embedding
contamination during the process, so the first thing the operator and I do
is start cleaning up the equipment, which gives one of the supervisors a
reason to stop by and share his wealth of "knowledge" with us, telling us
that we're wasting our time, because he knows all about this equipment, and
that I must not know anything about the equipment because in a real macho
man's factory, it's "supposed" to be dirty. I then get his supervisor on the
floor who's worried that we "won't meet the deadline" if I stop to clean up
equipment, and pressures me to stop. We clean the equipment over the
protests of the know-it-alls, then move to the next step, checking to make
sure it's level. Not only do we find that it's grossly out of level, but
that it has never been set on the required leveling screws which make it
easy to check and adjust the level on a regular basis with a large wrench. I
spend the next 3 days having to argue with a bunch of boneheads to explain
that a tool that is 250 microns out of level over the working surface is
going to have a hell of a time producing parts that have flatness and
parallelism within 5 microns. Once we get the machine jacked up, I then try
to train the maintenance people in the proper leveling procedure, but I get
another round of "I've been working here for 10/15/20 years and no engineer
is gonna tell me what to do". They would have none of my advice, and a
normal procedure that might take one technician 1-2 hours the first time he
did it (and 20-30 minutes after his skill improved) took an entire 8-hour
shift as Moe, Larry, and Curly attacked it with wrenches and kept undoing
each other's work - and it STILL wasn't right. I came in early the next day
and did it myself, just in time to see the 3 Wise Guys come in and tell me
that something must be wrong with my level, because it was impossible to do.
Later that day, a facilities tech who trained as a machinist in the Army
came by to check on my work, and listed to my description of the previous
days experience. He mentioned something about me wasting time trying to
teach pigs to sing before he wandered off...
As the project progressed, I found numerous equipment issues to deal with,
and faced massive internal resistance any time I tried to get something
corrected. My calibration tools and my pre-measured parts would wind up
missing, with various and sundry lame explanations as to why they happened
to just disappear. After explaining that I needed a BARE MINIMUM of 3 full
loads of test parts to check the machine before running any semblance of
production, I am told to get by with half a load, and that I'm wasting time
by not putting the tool into production right away (to make more bad parts)?
After 2 weeks of having to fight with the people I am trying to help just to
get things done, we are just about ready to run our first process tests. Of
course, all of my new-found oh-so-helpful "friends" stop by to offer their
advice, and tell me that the upper management is really upset with me (not
true, of course) because the tool hasn't produced any parts yet, and that
they will probably let me go because I supposedly don't know what I am
doing. I finally get 3 runs worth of parts, and I baby the first set through
by making partial runs, taking measurements, and making adjustments. 35 of
the 45 parts are acceptable, and even though this is far better yeld than
they have ever achieved, the "experts" start offering their advice "see, you
screwed up the machine by leveling it - we have known for years it works
better out of level" and other similar drivel. I take out my calculator,
work up some corrections, and reprogam the gear speeds and pressures, with
one of the peanut gallery protesting "you can't change those, we have always
run it at those settings". I make one pass on the second set of parts, and
at the end of the process, we lift the plates and remove the parts: ALL 45
MEET THE NEW SPEC, for everything - flatness, parallelism, surface finish.
In fact, the finish is so good that it looks like a polish - the operator is
running around showing a bunch of rather annoyed co-workers these parts,
telling them that these are the best he has ever seen at the company.
The peanut gallery sniffs and says it's a fluke, so we run another load - 43
out of 45 parts meet spec, for a yield at our new process conditions of
97.7% (that's an A to A+ in the manufacturing world). I write up a
qualification procedure for the new process and recommend that it be set up
in pilot plant mode for further validation for production. I also write up
some other recommendations for proper setup and maintenance of the
equipment, and the "experts" start whining to upper management again -
apparently I'm "making them look bad". I submit my review to the VP and CEO,
to find out that the VP has quit in disgust due to the resistance HE has
experienced in the company, and heads off to work at some high-tech research
facility in Switzerland. The CEO is pleased with my work, but hints that we
may not proceed much further due to a "difference of philosophy" he is
dealing in with the lower management types. I finish up this phase of the
project, and check in for further developments - but nobody will return my
call. I find out that the shop supervisors are not only sandbagging my
project, but a number of other high-priority projects initiated (or
attempted) by the new management. A few months later, I get a call from the
other consultant who tells me that the management is fed up with the
performance (or lack of it) at that facility, and is eliminating 2/3 of the
jobs and consolidating the remaining operations from 4 buildings to 2 by the
end of April. The facilities tech also calls me to let me know that there is
used equipment available for sale should I be able to find a home for it,
saying "ya might as well bid on it, because they sure don't have a clue what
to do with it here". I have a trip to make to Japan next week, but I will be
down there taking a look and making the company an offer. I have customers
in China and Malaysia that can use this, and of course it will include a
service contract for me to install it and train their own people how to use
it. In fact, I get a lot of business like this, thanks to companies staffed
by morons who resist any effort to improve their own skills and learn
something new. I'll get a good laugh out of seeing the same people who
fought my efforts to help them save their own jobs ***** and moan about how
their jobs are going overseas. Too bad most of them are too fucking stupid
to realize that they are the ones who stepped on their own cranks, but
that's not my problem... as long as I get my check. :O)
.
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