This is a funny situation that infuriates the entire workforce and destroys morale. Our company is building a new facility for us 1km down the road. We thought this would be a great opportunity to address a number of issues we currently face and impede our productivity and safety.
In our area through winter low temperatures may be around 0 degrees C with highs in the single digits. It's so cold I can bearly function at times. Our current facility was built in the 40s for a different purpose so we kind of forgive it and rug up and huddle around portable gas heaters.
When they told us about the new facility we thought this would be an excellent opportunity. We raised this issue and stated vert strongly it's importance. It's not only comfort it's productivity. We struggle to get anything done when it's that cold.
Anyway recently they had an unveiling and took us for a tour. It's still bare bones construction phase but enough to get the idea. The owner was telling us about these lovely windows from the office into the shop floor and how planning didn't want to permit them for fire safety reasons but he insisted. So they had to be fireproof windows with emergency shutters and all this and the 6 windows added an extra 150k to the build.
5 minutes later he was apologising about heating, they looked at it and ran the numbers and it was just too expensive. It would have cost 300k to install and then running costs. I do understand that's expensive but the facility has cost in the order of 10m.
Then as we were walking through all the offices and work spaces we were wondering why every room has two doors, even small 3×5 rooms. 'Oh that's part of the requirements to meet fire code, we will block them up later so don't worry about them. We wanted to avoid a fire suppression system as they are very expensive and so we need all these extra doors.'
I'm sorry what? We could have anywhere from 10m to 100m of equipment, 1000s of liters of fuel and 20+ people in here… you're right a fire suppression system does sound expensive.
The real kicker is they built this facility in a place that requires the council to move a road in order for us to have public access. Sounds weird but that's the case. With out the change the facility is cut off from incoming work and useless. The council simply don't have the budget for it after a small funding misshap. The state gov don't want to fund it and neither does the federal. And the whole facility is geared towards servicing a particular piece of equipment that is too large to come in even if the road is moved. A separate road will need to be rebuilt with a higher weight capacity.
Less than 18months after they purchased and began this build, land on the correct side of the road is being subdivided and developed for industry which would have circumvented these issues. This was stage 2 of the industrial development of the area and clearly mapped out. We bought into stage 1 despite it not being a suitable location due to impatience.
And those are only some of the issues.
This whole process has been conducted with such blatant negligence and incompetence that I struggle to understand how these people got the be where they are or why I should work for them?