So I quit my job yesterday. I was a welder working in trailer manufacturing and had been there for just over 2 years. Going in, I knew that the pay wasn't going to be stellar, but they were willing to train me and it would get me out of customer service jobs.
When I got hired, I was told it would take 3 months to train into being a welder. I did it in 2. When we all had to get recertified (not AWS), I was 1 of 4 people that passed all 3 parts of the test on the first try. I was 1 of 2 (MAYBE 3) people on the entire site that can run the plas table and band saw. I had seniority over everyone left in my line and could handle just about any task in it.
The company had been hemorrhaging their tenured employees because of the pay and many lines were falling behind as few of the new people had more than 3 months on them. And so they started making us all stay later, even if our line wasn't affected, thus turning 10 hour days (5 days a week) into 12 hour days.
I had talked with my boss and asked after having been there so long and for all that I can do there, why I was only making $17/hr only to get a weak excuse about attendance, which he used on all the others that have been there a while. But I had been tracking it on my phone, and was absolutely nowhere near even getting a verbal warning. Meanwhile, many new hires are coming in at $21 when the quality of many of their welds could barely justify $15. But they came in at a higher rate because of the “market value.” I tried explaining to him what all I contribute and that as a single father that I had to make more or that I'd look elsewhere as well as how I applied to multiple other positions within the company only to get ignored/dodged, but he wouldn't budge. And so he backtracked as to why I wasn't staying until 6, but he wouldn't listen as to why all the lines have fallen behind, how I can't justify staying that late for such low pay, or how it didn't seem to matter at all last time we had to stay so long as I haven't had a raise in over a year. He tried to be “gracious” and told me he'll drop one of my attendance points for leaving early. I told him if I point out, I point out, but I didn't tell him that I had already made up my mind on leaving.
To add to this, my line lead's last day was Friday, leaving for the same reason as everyone else. To effectively run the line, there should be a minimum of 8, ideally 10, but every time we lost someone no matter the reason, they were never replaced. We had 6 before the lead and I left. To make matters worse, 1 just started welding that week and she has yet to really learn the line, 1 is out for wrist surgery and will be gone for some time, and 1 (though he did pass his tests eventually) is absolutely terrible at welding and tends to throw tools at the walls, so he's pretty much relegated to installing axles and scraping the trailers before they go to paint. So effectively, there's only 1 person who is of much use to that line right now. The other guy who can run the plas table for sure is a lead in another line but has been running a forklift for much of his time as there's not enough drivers. So my line will likely be shut down and any other line that requires my work can't build those specific trailers for the time being. But I do wonder what that's going to cost them- my line built the big trailers you see typically hauling construction equipment, and those aren't cheap.
All I asked for was to be able to make ends meet and move out of my parent's house before I'm 40, not a megayacht. Those extra hours wouldn't have amounted to much after taxes and would only result in me in another line likely hindering the already slow new people as I'm not familiar with their product or fucking around because there's not enough machines to work with, so why stay? At least make it voluntary before it becomes a problem. And to think that with all I did there, I only made 25ยข more per hour than I did stocking shelves overnight at Albertsons- less so after you calculate the cost of insurance, union fees (at Albertsons) and the like.