I tried making this post as a reply to another thread at three AM this morning when i just could not sleep. I was angry, and depressed, and looking to yell into the void for just a bit for some self-satisfaction and then my phone decided to glitch. Over half an hour of typing on a touch sensitive keypad and there it all went, poof. So now here i am for a second time, even more cross than before and looking to tell my story about a company that hates its workers and why I am happy, despite all the troubles that have come, to no longer be there.
Up until the end of April i had worked for a company called Inteva, they are a privately owned company (That will come up later) who supplies plastic car door interiors to GM. For the nearly four years i worked there i had to deal with two layoffs, one for a GM strike in 2019 and one for COVID, two contract negotiations, and generally shit you always deal with when it comes to a union shop. It was all going, not great, but fine for the most part until we came back from a Christmas break to be greeted with a notice, tacked up without any notification to the workers, that over 1/3s of the current workforce would be permanently laid off. The union had been notified about this the day before, there was no discussion, nothing just sudden words from on-high that over 140 people would be losing their jobs.
Why was this happening? Well the tl:dr of it is money as is everything, i guess the president needed a new boat or something, who knows. The nitty gritty of reasons were twofold, one, they wanted to save money by transferring the production lines to Bluffton, Indiana to be closer to GM and save on transportation costs and labor costs since the Bluffton plant is a non-union shop. The second is just a general feeling that since our contract negotiations went heavily in our way last year that the company was finding a way to punish us.
In any case, they began shipping injection molding presses out to Bluffton at an ever quicker pace, and we were all laid off with a weeks notice in march. Since we had not worked enough hours our vacation time was not paid out, and we had been unable to take any PTO the entire time. They had planned this you see, lay us off quick enough, and no one gets vacation time. Fast forward two weeks and they were calling nearly everyone back.
As you can probably see from this incident, this company suffers from a chronic case of mismanagement. They have had so many OSHA violations, fines from GM, and generally take the union contract as a suggestion to the point where the UAW regional president came to visit to smack them. Why did they call us back? Well it leads into that mismanagement. Bluffton has a high turnover rate due to them working people to the bone since they have no contract protecting them, and paying them like shit. This leads to massive production issues, missing order deadlines, and quality issues to the point where they send the door lines back to my factory in order to make up the slack. And thus, i went back to work.
IT was clear from the get-go they did not want us back, they had cancelled all of our badges so getting into the building was a headache, we were also sent through orientation once again since they had gotten rid of all of our paperwork. Two weeks, and they had washed their hands of us. In violation of the contract they send us all to door lines, not back to where we were originally laid off from, and then proceeded to violate the contract again by only having us work three day weeks (24 hours) when we were guaranteed 40 hours a week. On-top of this, they brought back the bare minimum to run the door lines, meaning we had no coverage, if someone had a sick day? you were working short.
This nightmare of a company was taking more and more from me to the point where the money was feeling less and less worth it each day. And finally, the time study lady came around, timed the line, and decided they could eliminate another position. This meant, that my station was doing my work, and the work of the station next to me, within thirty seconds (an already impossible task) So, i grabbed my stuff, told my boss i quit, and walked the fuck out.
Since then i have been unemployed, i cant get unemployment so I've been donating plasma to try and support myself. No one is calling me back in over 200 job applications filed, and I'm just generally tired, work out, and hateful… And yet. I don't regret quitting that hellhole. Sometimes you just reach your limits of what you can handle as a person, of what you can allow to keep happening to you. Sometimes you just have to tell a company to fuck off, and despite everything. I'm proud i managed to do that.