fuzzymoomoo

they did for a while but it was kind of a half assed effort and they gave up when met with resistance from the company. It was shortly after that when the corruption scandals started.

That’s almost twice what I get. 33 times the amount if you factor in that I’m not allowed to use my vacation time for any other reason than July shutdown.

Allegedly. I’m not believing anything written in the media until a deal is reached and I’m holding the highlights in my hand.

They did. Terms have not been released to the public. Maybe @Oacjay98 has an idea of when the membership is going to see it and can share some details.

Salary tends to stay out of the way of trades at my facility. Obviously they get antsy the longer something is down but I haven’t heard too many stories of management outright getting in the way.

That is one thing that’s been a theme since I began in the apprenticeship program. Unless you’re in facilities or on a special project, at least 90 percent of our job is troubleshooting.

My arm injury happened installing windows. Show me an autoworker who doesn’t have carpal tunnel from squeezing a trigger on a nut runner 400+ times a shift 5 days a week for years on end and I’ll show you some nice oceanfront property in Kansas. What we do isn’t easy, it only looks like it because we’ve all done it for so long.

Final assembly is literally everything after paint. Some jobs are great. I loved the door panel job. Yes I had to do both front and rear door but my partner on the job with me alternated cars and I wasn’t tied to an error proofing box so I had a little room to walk. It did have its drawbacks, I couldn’t use a mallet to seat the door so I had to use the palm of my hand. Padded gloves only made it so my hands weren’t bruised. Other jobs are awful. Friends of mine who did the main wiring harness job all tell me it was brutal. The part was heavy and it took a lot of muscle and effort to manipulate it into the correct position. All of those little push pins take their toll after a while. Almost everyone ends up with arthritis at some point because of it. I’m lucky I moved to body when I did but I still have lingering issues from my days in final. The tendinitis in my elbow came from my first week working there and it’s been bothering me something terrible for the last month. I have very little strength in my right arm at the moment because of it.

I can’t speak to the niche engine line but typically specialty jobs (usually anything you have to bid on) like inspectors , garage repair, team leaders and utilities do carry a premium. When I was a backup team leader I got an extra 30 cents an hour whenever I filled in as TL. Had I been a full fledged team leader and gone through the team leader training it would have been $1.50.

In body and stamping it’s that way but in final it’s pretty much all manual. It’s not necessarily the skill, it’s the physicality of the jobs people struggle with.

Im not the only one that doesn’t want the bonuses because they’re taxed as unearned income. Plus the union takes a bigger cut of those which rubs a lot of people wrong.

Im with you. I counter with it would be an easier pill to swallow since it’s a number that can be rationalized and explained rather than arbitrarily tying it to CEO pay increase percentage. Speaking of which, I would love to see a breakdown of the Big 3 CEOs pay. How much of that obscene number does the company itself pay and how much of the rest of it is from stock options and the like. I’m willing to bet the company itself only pays $5 million or less of that.

I believe there’s a growing contingent that you won’t ever hear from for fear of being shouted down and shunned that agree with me that with a few tweaks that most recent offer (that we know of) really wasn’t terrible. The only thing I would have liked to see from it is a more robust COLA formula and a shorter (read: 4 or less years) path to top wage.

the longer this goes on, the less I like it. There’s no amount of selling to the membership that is going to get a contract any less than what was publicly demanded ratified now. I fear we’re screwed.

Watch them not offer the 7.2kw on the Ranger to try to sway buyers into the F-150.

None of it matters if the agreement ends up being good but I guess it’s too much to expect patience from the majority anymore.

I’ve never claimed anything to the contrary. I’ve said from day one I have my doubts about the strategy.

So they’re being unreasonable, got it. Why be mad if the company is willing to bargain?

This is not a thing. Nobody has ever said it’s a thing so stop this nonsense. The whole point of an apprenticeship is to learn the trade. It would be ridiculous for me to expect to make as much as the journeyman I’m working with. And by that same token, any journeyman stupid enough to put a brand new apprentice into a 480 panel alone should be fired immediately for being reckless.

That would take a massive change in operating agreements at the individual plants. As it currently is unless you’re a team leader, utility worker or in the pool (read: extra) you’re on one job into perpetuity unless you bid into a different department.

Why not? What’s wrong with giving openings at other plants to displaced workers before hiring new people? I agree with you on that whole pay laid off workers to work elsewhere thing is ridiculous, I don’t know who other than Shawn Fain thinks that’s a good idea.

Nobody is asking for that. 8 years is too long, it should be the length of 1 contract at most.

Im just starting the apprenticeship program right now (which is making this all that much more stressful) and I will say this, yes the skill set required today is completely different than what it was 25-30 years ago. PLCs in themselves is a specialty that takes a lot of time to navigate and master. At my building there’s technically a few different “classifications” if you can really call it that, it’s more just what department you’re in. That doesn’t make any difference in pay, we all make the same thing. Votes is kind of irrelevant, Trades and production vote on the contracts separately. 2015 I believe it was FCA that had their trades vote down their contract but it was somehow overruled by UAW international. I’m not entirely sure how and why that happened.

It’s because it’s not publicly talked about every 4 years

Im not entirely sure. I know of guys who previously worked in construction and took a pay cut to come to Ford.