Jobs Bank: Getting paid $30/hour to sit in a room all day and do nothing

[Michael Cacioppo]

Tom, as I said I worked in the Aerospace industry for over 40 years, yup some engineers are just plain dumb. But to give you a different view, let me say this. Practical experience is worth a whole lot of book knowledge. Being a mechanical engineer I can probably design an engine that could actualy work. It is not my field and would probably come out piss poor. It is one thing to theoretically know how something is to be built, but hands on experience is invaluable. Rebuilding an engine, by the hand of an experienced mechanic, will come out better than a rebuild by a mechanical engineer with no experience in doing it.



Sometimes the bean counters need to be throttled. Case in point, the 5R55E has some issues with 2-3 tranny flare. This is most likely an Engineering design flaw when the tranny was redesigned from the previous 4 speed version. I'm sure that the engineer realizes the problem and a fix is available. The bean counters don't want to admit that there is a problem and require a call back to insert a modified part on every 5R55E tranny. The after market industry knows there is a problem and has upgraded parts for the problem. The bean counter doesn't look at the total picture. It will be expensive to run the callback, but it is much more expensive, in my opinion, to rebuild an entire tranny under warranty. I will bet, that the expected life before failure is over 36K miles and therefore only a few will be repaired under Ford's nickle. The do not see that customer dissatisfaction will cost them more in the long run. Isn't it suspicious that Ford appears to have redesigned the mechanics in the '07 Sport Trac?

 

[Richard L]

Those Job Banks are set up by the Unions to ensure that the autoworkers getting their pay while layed off, etc are not working somewhere else. So they keep them locked up all day to prevent them from going out and finding meaningful work.



The workers do not have to stay there, but if they leave the will be denied their union salary and perhaps their pension. Nobody is loosing money since the money they get paid by the union was accumulated from the union dues paid by the workers.



And yes, it is amazing the amount of money those assembly line workers make for relatively unskilled labor. It is also amazing how much money the executives of GM, Ford, and Chrysler make in salary and bonuses even when the company is loosing Billions each year!



...Rich

 

[Paul Maurer 2]

There was an article in the NY Times recently about the two generations of industrial workers and the vast disparity in pay and benefits for older vs. newly hired workers. The new hires will likely never achieve the modest rewards of past factory workers, ie the bass boat, the vacation to Alaska, or the newer home. The company profiled was Caterpillar, which made a profit of over $500 million last year, but needs union shift workers to give up wages and benefits to ensure "global competitiveness". The glaring omission in the story was a comparison of the current CEOs pay to the CEOs pay of 20 years ago. I have no doubt that todays CEO makes at least 5 times what his predecessor did and will justify that based on "talent" and market worth. The basic fact is that CEOs sit on each others boards and compensation committees, ensuring that their pay rarely if ever suffers, even in bankruptcy. The shameless greed is astonishing, as is the disconnect between the $10 million beachfront mansion and the laid off factory worker facing foreclosure.