A Corporate America Rant

Wide Lawns is the inspiration for today’s post because she wrote about people with strange ideas so I decided to write about work.

I work for a major plastic manufacturer. I can’t tell you the name but we make plastic vials. We make the vials for the mini version of the candy that melts in your mouth and not in your hand. We also make diabetic testing vials, the ones you put the little strip in. That’s our main money maker and the one I have been the most involved with. If you have ever been to a major league ballpark and bought a drink that came in a 16 oz hard plastic cup with a cool logo on it that was probably one of ours. We used to make sippy cups for a very well known baby product company but they started putting ‘made in China’ on their boxes which we objected to because the cups ARE produced in the US of A. So we quit making the sippy cups and we have to wait a year before we can make more for another company.

And it is the sippy cups which probably is the cause of what I’m about to write. You see, one whole room is idle. No machines are going. No one has been laid off, which I greatly appreciate, but one whole room is idle so therefore we MUST conserve money.

I understand and indeed, it is perfectly reasonable for a company to want to save money while production is down. It’s the way we’re going about it that pisses me off.

If I were running the company I wouldn’t make my employees bear the brunt of the savings. But work has decided the best way to save money is by going from a weekly pay period to a bi-monthly system. The simple fact is the money is in an interest drawing account and the longer it sits in said account the more interest it can accrue. Work asked us to ‘vote’. They then bribed us with $250.

It went this way- if the majority voted for being paid every two weeks then we would be paid $250. If the majority voted no, we got nothing. I am told the issue passed. I’d really like to see the actual votes.

I voted against it. To begin with I HATE being paid every two weeks because I’ve only got money coming in twice a month. Once before I had the misfortune to be the paid this way and my hours didn’t go 40, over time, another 40. Oh no, it went 80 hours then overtime so they worked the hell out of me one week and sent me home early every day the next week.

Also I feel that if the VP is willing to give every full-time employee $250 then he could give us a lot more. I would have been much happier with a $500 Christmas bonus.

Second (and now we come to the reason for today’s post; you thought I wasn’t ever going to here didn’t you?) there are better ways to save money.

I wrote all of this down, btw, when I turned in my vote. It was ignored.

First we have lights we never turn off. Actually they can’t be turned off, they just burn 24/7

We have ten engineers working on one project that might require, maybe, one engineer.

Our head of house-keeping orders $500 worth of cleaning supplies every week and the plant is NASTY!

We have four janitors. They clean the bathrooms, the break room, the main hallway, and a few offices and that is all.

Whenever a pallet is made we tag it on all four sides with a sheet of paper. This paper contains the pallet id number, the date, how many boxes are on it, and the customer name. One box is then taken off the pallet and checked for defects. The pallet is then either placed on hold or released. It is tagged again with white paper. At the end of the day, the quality manager reviews the paperwork from all the pallets verified and assigns a color. The second set of tags is ripped off and colored ones go on. So ONE pallet gets 16 sheets of paper. We make about 20 pallets per SHIFT, so that’s 40 pallets in 24 hours or 640 sheets of paper. How much do you think that costs?

We store junk and pay to do it. There are things we will never use again, like equipment purchased for customers we no longer have. The smart thing to do would be to sell that equipment, but not us, we store it on a trailer. Did I mention we don’t own any of these trailers? We rent them for roughly $100 a month. There are currently 60 storage trailers behind our plant. That is not counting all the other trailers we rent to move our current stock from warehouse to warehouse.

Finally we have too many people doing one job. We have a parts room attendant (that’s me), a purchaser, and a shipping and receiving manager. So our purchaser orders hoses, the shipping and receiving manager determines that yes, they may go to me, so he gets them off the truck and gives them to our purchaser, who takes them to me and then I take them out of the box and hang them up. I love my job (it’s very easy) but a far more efficient method would be a purchaser tending to a parts room who also manages all shipping and receiving.

Oh and that $250? There’s a catch. It will be added to the gross pay which means my bonus will be taxed, so I’ll actually get around $200 which I think is just adding insult to injury. I know some people voted for it because they thought they were getting extra money, but really we’re getting screwed and the $250 isn’t the KY jelly, it’s a stick to bite while the ass is getting torn up.