Is it really that tough out there ? FIRED !

Depends on how he cracked it... The answer is in the details which you didn't provide. I'm sure that there is a *lot* more to the story than getting canned for a one-time accident or mistake.

A buddy of mine went back to work at a state office building in the maintnance department, for three days a week.Before that, he was working there five days a week.It wasen't long before his boss had him back on five days a week.He said this summer he is going to tell his boss four days a week or he is going to quit. cuhulin

Specific tech from out nation wide company was considered to have a bad attitude and was let go. Major problem was he tended to vent his vocal feelings while on the job, i. e. in customer's residences. Gent was about 10 days behind sending cores and duds out and had a slight problem "K.P" his company van.

My responce was to contact the first tech, who has already voiced his opinion about coming back (Very attimately Negative) and eat crow if they actually want him to return.

No, that's right. They get sued instead.

a clear cut case of why unions were formed and why they are so necessary still. welcome to the wonders of industrial relations in a market economy.....

Bullshit. If electronic repair was a union job, no one on earth could afford to repair anything. I worked at a union defense contractor, and equipment ended up scrapped, because they couldn't decide who was to make a repair. I worked in 'Quality Assurance' on the PRC-77. My first night on the job the union steward got in my face, telling me the long list of things that I wasn't allowed to do. I reminded her that my job was not union, and I didn't want to do my work, and theirs. More than once, the head of production "Borrowed" me to "Instruct" his union workers on how to repair things like the gearbox for the PRC-77 tuner, or how to solder large items to a PC board without damage.

Now, tell me how many 'Union' TV shops there WERE?

BTW, that union went on strike in the late '60s, demanding a double digit pay increase. The company went to Mexico and built a 'module' plant to build subassemblies. By the time they finished their pissing match, the people who still had a job went back at exactly half of what they were making before that strike, and over half the jobs stayed in Mexico.

....says who? Open your eyes - the REAL reason nobody can afford to repair anything is because the electronics industry is allowed to do what it likes, building ever cheaper consumer items for which spares are at best hideously expensive or at worst not even available. Result: the company directors and a few shareholders make more, whilst the consumer suffers and has to foot the bill for the environmental costs of this stupidity. Unions are not always perfect i admit, but at least in their presence abusive treatment of workers like the OP described would be less common. Don't know about you, but I believe that profit is not more important than people.

the only thing that this proves is you had a weak government who allowed this shameful corporate behaviour to go on at the expense of the citizens who elected it and whose interests it was supposed to be representing. Funny how , in the neoliberal ideology, capital can cross borders freely but people can't....

Okay, I'll admit it! I'm sick and tired of trying to deprogram union stooges.

It is the consumer's fault that so much throw away crap is built, because they are too stupid and too cheap to buy quality, repairable equipment. At my last job we built telemetry receivers that sold for $20,000 to $80,000 each. Our customers didn't question the price, they wanted reliable, supportable equipment. if the electronics industry was 100% union a desktop computer wouldn't even exist, because more union workers would be needed to build mechanical adding machines ant typewriters. I had the IBEW try to unionize the cable TV company I worked for. They GUARANTEED me $2.50 an hour less than I was making, a week's less vacation, no unwanted overtime and several other useless things that would have cost me about $8,000 a year in lower income and dues to join. They told the field techs they wouldn't have to work on the cold wet Cincinnati nights when we had major temperature related outages, or those really hot, muggy afternoons during the summer. Or that they had to be good at their jobs, because they would strike the company if anyone was fired. We would have been out of business in a month.

The thing you have absolutely no clue about is that repair is nothing like manufacturing. VERY little repair work is EVER done on a production line. Each repair is a different brand, a different model, with different problems. If you think a union shop could make money and keep customers happy, you're brain dead.

This will continue as long as people are happy forking over their cash for trash, knowing full well that 95% or more isn't worth taking home, for free. It started with the cheap stereos, TVs and CB radios back in the late '60 and early '70s and has got ever worse as people no longer expected anything to last, or even work very well. It was CHEAP, and that was all that mattered.

Don't try to put words in my mouth, stooge. You don't even have the guts to use your name online, yet you are trying to preach your ignorant unionism crap. My first job was in a TV shop when I was 13. I worked full time at another shop (That also did industrial electronics) for two years after I graduated. Then I was called up for the draft. I was given five separate 4F ratings for health problems, but they drafted me anyway, because of my electronics background. While in basic training, I tested out of the three year course US Army electronics school at Ft. Monmoth and was awarded the M.O.S. of broadcast engineer. I worked with CATV headends, CARS, and weather equipment, RADAR, the world's first emergency alert system that took control of 13 CATV systems around Ft. Rucker and delivered emergency information on all 12 channels on all the systems. I have built a TV station from an empty building, moved radio stations, and built studios.

I worked as a broadcast engineer in both radio & TV, owned and operated an industrial electronics repair business for years, repaired computers to the component level, sold and serviced business radio systems, did Quality Assurance in an electronics defense plant, and at the end of my career, I worked as a production and engineering test tech for the world leader in modular telemetry equipment. Have you ever done anything but push unions? Do you know why it was so hard to remove car radios for repair? The union fought the change to a through the dash design that could be done by a single employee, rather than the six people the current system used. That drove up the price of US built cars, along with other stupid union labor intensive steps that slowed production, lowered quality and allowed the imports to take over the market.

Allow it? They were all for it. They needed the radios and shipboard RADAR equipment for the US military, and the idiot union was determined to stay out for years. The idiots in the union told them they couldn't be replaced, because all their jobs required VERY high skill levels. Two weeks after the plant in Mexico opened, former farm workers were doing quite well at their jobs. You truly are a brainwashed union stooge.

BTW, you should be out there kissing Obama's union loving ass instead of wasting our time on a repair newsgroup.

All a "union" is, is a government sanctioned way to wrest control of a company from the rightful owner.

What was the last figures from Detroit? The average auto maker has $1500 dollars worth of health care costs and $1500+ in retirement dollars in $10,000 worth of product. No wonder they want socialized medicine and retirement. It transfers that liability to the taxpayer. Where did that cost come from? Yep, union coercion. When we ran the numbers here it is about $30 per 10K of product. So, the $1500 isn't even funny, it is OBSCENE! BUT, you will never get a union monkey to change its' mind. They ruined some of the biggest and best companies in the world and then bitch when the jobs go elsewhere. Go figure.

Jim

I agree that the average consumer doesn't understand much about what he's buying, and too often chooses price over quality. But I'm not sure his ignorance and "cheapness" explains why modern products are designed the way they are.

If you compared a hand-held CB transceiver of 45 years ago with a modern amateur handy-talky, you'd note a roughly thousand-fold increase in circuit complexity. The amateur transceiver is impossible to build with discrete components. It requires complex ICs and hundreds of tiny SMDs crammed onto a tiny board. Such products, regardless of their quality, are inherently difficult to service.

It's not possible to return to easily serviced products, because we'd have to go back to simple, unsophisticated devices.

One other point... There's nothing wrong -- other than wasting natural resources (!!!) -- with really cheap products that can't be serviced. As long as they last a reasonable amount of time, you can toss them and buy a new one without feeling you've wasted your money. And let's not forget that technology changes so rapidly that products are sometimes subjectively obsolete before they have time to fail.

What bothers me is _expensive_ items (such my Palm PDA and iRiver jukebox) that I expect to last at least a decade, and be repairable at a not-too-unreasonable price (eg, half the price of an equivalent new product). I consider these to be long-term investments, and expect the manufacturer to support them.

PS: I am, in general, pro-union. Unions will disappear when businesses start treating their employees as business partners, rather than as a disposable "resource".

You mean the employees? They're the ones who do the work that creates the wealth that keeps the company in business.

The government cannot "sanction" unions, as their existence is inherent in the rights of individuals to associate to promote their interests -- just as capitalists associate to make money by exploiting other people's labor. The right to form a union is protected by the Bill of Rights.

American automakers have been in a slow cycle of self-destruction for the last 50 years, and it has only a little to do with retirement benefits.

An employee is a voluntary member of a work force UNLESS the company is employee owned. I have always worked for ME and if I didn't like the pay or benefits of where I was working I got a better job. Novel concept.

Sure, but the government forces a company to deal with "organized labor" instead of just getting new workers. If you don't like the benefits or the pay, get a better job. As soon as the government says you can't fire a guy because he is on strike then the government has now seized control of that company. Period. If you don't want to work for the pay offered, the company should be free to find some one that will work for that pay. If no one will take the job for that pay scale then the scale would be moved upwards. Simple supply and demand.

No, it has a lot with the baggage of costs that have occurred because of them having to make deals with unions that were financially untenable. If you think $3K+ of overhead per 10K of product is a good thing then you have been a union lackey too long. While over seas companies have been staying lean and mean unions have burdened US auto manufacturers with overhead they can't handle.

Jim

snipped-for-privacy@earthl>> You mean the employees? They're the ones who do the work that creates

This is like saying that people eat and breathe only because they _want_ to.

Yeah... and when there wasn't a "better" job, what did you do? Good jobs don't grow on trees.

in

as

The

Debatable. Besides, how else would government protect people's freedom to associate?

You forget that Henry Ford used the police to break up strikes.

But it doesn't work that way. Look at the influx of illegal immigrants. They prevent the market from working properly (ie, increased wages for work people aren't excited about). Cheap labor destroys good-paying jobs.

benefits.

Having to? I thought businesses were free to do as they liked. Who cares if a strike destroys a company? That's the company's problem.

The basic problem with the American auto industry is that it doesn't want to compete. Nor, like most businesses, does it see its employees as partners in its enterprise.

Quite agree. this is the crux of the whole issue.

Sadly, this is lost on so many ignorant, foul mouthed people like Micahel Terrell, who seem only capable of ranting and foaming at the mouth about 'union stooges ' and telling anyone who supports the right of employees to organise themselves to 'kiss obama'a ass'.

-B

start

disposable

I once worked for a company that stated -- on a poster -- that they didn't like unions, and would do anything to keep unions out of their company, including, but not limited to, treating their employees properly.

I don't think Michael is so much anti-union as he is against the government's vigorous support of union rights.

The employees don't WANT to be partners. Partners share the bad parts with the good. Auto industry employees become part of the bad parts, because when the bad parts come, they force the industry to indemnify them from the bad parts.

You seem to have added a right that is not found in the BOR. Exactly where is that right specified?

Leonard

You are correct. Good jobs don't grow on trees. People who own businesses make profits and can afford to pay people well. Good paying jobs are also created by union coersion, and businesses that survive in spite of it are often doomed to becoming non-competitive in the market. Has the last half of the last century taught you nothing?

Leonard

The US auto industry is a shining example of this. There are good things about unions, but it seems they often become greedy to the point of driving their business into the ground. If my field unionized, every one of our jobs would be outsourced to India before we knew what hit us. I don't mind being non-union, if I don't like the way I'm being treated as an employee, I resign and get a job elsewhere. I've done it before and doubt that will be the last time in my career.