Forum Post: Life in a machine shop.
Posted 12 years ago on June 9, 2012, 7:24 p.m. EST by DKAtoday
(33802)
from Coon Rapids, MN
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
[-] 2 points by Riley2011 (83) from New Britain, CT 1 hour ago
Wages are becoming lower Retirement is almost a thing of the past Employees are increasingly having to pay more for insurance Hours- please....we work like pigs compared to most countries- less vacation...why? we are not protected in our jobs.... The union is being dismantled...and we are not talking about wage protection- I personally have perfect evals but work in a hell hole and our union has been dismantled- I work in fear Here is the thing- I think most people in the system don't take vacation or rest because they are scared and the Capitalist pigs can treat us like vermin and replace us...watch- more hours...less pay- we are not in a Capitalist society- America was that when a family of 4 could survive on 1 wage...still take a nice vacation and have healthy food on the table- not corporate sludge.... ↥twinkle ↧stinkle reply permalink
[-] 1 points by DKAtoday (7565) from Coon Rapids, MN 43 minutes ago
HaH - that is funny ( kind of ) some of us in the shop would occasionally look up from our work catch the eye of the guy across from us and yell out our battle cry - More Hours - Less Pay. Newbies wondered - WTF??? Did not take them long to catch on to the sarcasm though.
Another one was : I Live - For My Job.
This was all especially funny when working in the summertime in an uninsulated converted horse barn - outside temp 80 degrees inside temp over 110 degrees.
Yep - good times.
Ah - yes another one ( because we were always expected to make up for loss of production on 1st shift ) was just plain and simply screamed at the top of your lungs - MORE PARTS - you heard that one all of the time from all over the shop.
you do all the work. you should get the reward.
I think it's time to remove the owners from the equation.
you see DK the 1% want you to know that they are not going to work you to death, they're just going to work you right up next to death, so you should not be so upset...
They work you right to the point of death so that any money you managed to save, and all of your assets can then be siphoned off into the medical system.
exactly, got a friend (real smart fellow), he lays out a pretty good case on that, he picked up on it about twenty years ago was telling me about it.
OH - well - thanks - I feel better now.
People we will all be on the government dole if things keep going as they are. The more work that leaves our shore to be done elsewhere - means more people living off of aid.
How long can that continue?
Pretty soon the only ones with money to pay any sort of taxes will be the few wealthy that make their money over seas.
How long will that go on as foreign markets also lose their jobs due to no demand for products due to lack of money/customers.
Will the few wealthy then support world economy by buying from each other?
What is happening in the world business practices is a downward spiral to chaos.
Truly where we're heading look to the monarchies of old, peasants and royals, with tech they can control a lot, once they have seized the ballot box with the TVs. Here Cockburn says “keep them on the hook with insupportable debt” he was talking about the IMF and developing nations, but how does that differ from the place many find themselves in throughout the US and Europe? How does it differ from our governments, when the 1% says “this” is all we will pay and you must do without the rest?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Chagwk0IyA0
I went through a government sponsored training program for $2500 to get a production machine shop job just like this one. They paid me 15 cents above minimum wage because of the program. What a scam. That was my last job in western NY.
I can relate one of the jobs I ran for this company was making spacer rings for use in disk drives. A tolerance from 0 point of +/- .0005 this being run on vintage WWII machines. We were at that point in time the benchmark for the world in production and quality. The owner bitched at me because I wanted a pay increase - Don't you know that not everyone gets paid enough to have a nice new luxury Cadillac like mine? That's OK boss I will settle for a new car that gets some decent gas mileage.
It's funny how machinists are proud of how small their tolerances are.
If you worked with the machinery - manually adjusted and constantly changing due to temperature variation and tool wear - yeah you might begin to appreciate the challenge. That is only the begining - these machines a lot of them were not built to hold those kinds of tolerances. So proud would be fair but also unbelievable at times if you understood the challenge.
Yes I understand the challenge. Over 5 years on Bridgeport mills and other manual and CNC equipment.
Actually the phrase "It's funny how machinists are proud of how small their tolerances are" is a play on words relating to the size of the male member.
Another machinist related phrase is "machinists do it more accurately".
AHhahaahaahaha - yeah - it's been awhile - QA guys and engineers were quite a lot like that as well. I worked some CNC but not enough to pick-up on that humor. God what memories this stirs up.
LOL. I was going to say, I think he's just kidding.
OH - Man - what memories. Some of the toughest years of my life some really good friends and good times as well. Was where I also met some notorious back riders as well - management and regular slackers.
And on that note :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIARNcFlRbQ
This place was +/- .0010. Some metal part. Big CNC.
Ah - sorry to say but gravy work that's a pretty loose tolerance to hold on a CNC. I know they likely worked you like a dog - but +/- .001 ? wow that would be a real wet dream as we were working with NC machinery. Take out the drop gauge with the magnetic stand place it on your tool in relation to motion and then take an allen wrench to tweak an adjustment.
The job was easy but the pay was really low.
I don't doubt it. Was It in anyway a union shop? I kind of doubt if it was but never assume.
No union. Bunch of Bircher army officers ran the place. They sent some BS in the mail when I started saying they couldn't pay better wages because of the price of electricity. Didn't identify themselves of course but I knew they sent it.
Yes - there are all kinds of nasty loose in our world.
I told them I was a drunken sailor and I was leaving the state. Out of the frying pan into another frying pan.
Aint it always the way for the common individual? Life can be a real adventure.
if you owned a mule, he would eat, if he worked or not...
What?
well I'm just saying he might as well be working, right?
Hopefully in a healthy and prosperous manner for himself and his owner (?) that would be a good thing for the owner and the owned mule. But we are not mules and we are not owned. Not yet - we are close to being owned with working for slave wages - but - we are not owned - not yet - and hopefully never.
hey man I know it gets crazy in here I was just sticking to the sarcatic theme of the post, but I do get confusing sometimes sorry
My grandfather worked in a machine shop all his life and he never once called in sick. I remember how sad I felt when, after he died, I was going through his papers to terminate his pension and discovered that he never had paid sick time. So, he worked through whatever illnesses or bad days he ever had to provide for his family. I don't think he had much vacation time either and I know he lived on a very tiny pension.
It was a real tough life for many and if you didn't work in the industry you would have no idea. It was not like the machining films they used to show you in grade school. Those films showed dream conditions.
Another favored crowd please'r was when the machine you were running started spitting foam out of the coolant lines due to chip build up in the coolant trough plugging the pump filter. This is a bad thing as the tools then build up material instead of shedding it and your parts get fucked-up in many interesting ways - not to mention that your tool life drops drastically. So - You Shut Down The Machine to do the proper maintenance and clean-up and your supervisor comes by to yell at you - Why the Hell is this machine shut down? Well dick head we need to clean it and inspect the tooling as it started shooting foam out of the coolant lines. Well - But - But - can't you clean it with the machine running? Fuck off shit head - you ever hear of a thing called safe operation?