Mostly just wondering if what I’m seeing is normal in the industry.
I work for a small, non union plant that makes wiring harness components for the auto industry. We had a plant wide meeting three weeks ago about how this strike could be coming up, just to “fill you all in on the situation”. I thought it was a little odd, maybe getting skittish?
Fast forward to this week, and they seem to be in full panic mode. No overtime allowed, starting immediately, even though we’re just barely caught up on orders, and almost all of the part numbers are “hot”.
Now, I’m okay not working any overtime, if I don’t need the money. The problem is that we’re not fully staffed to run what we need to, so all three shifts have had people working OT to fill the gaps. Plus, we’ve been running nonstop for weeks now to catch stuff up, and if we fall behind on deliveries it’s coming out of our “gainsharing” bonus.
And on top of that, they’re already trying to claw as much production out of as few people as possible. All of the machines are marked as priority, most people are getting an extra responsibility tacked onto their schedule to eliminate a body needed.
Today someone called in, and instead of shutting that persons area down, they ran it with no operator, and had four people all cover it when they could.
And they’ve said themselves, our sector is pretty auxiliary to the big 3, and they don’t expect our orders to be impacted for weeks. But they’re already gearing up to lay a bunch of people off and claw everything they can out of those left.
Just wanted to get a gauge from others in manufacturing, are others seeing a similar response? It seems outrageous to me.
TL;DR: The plant I work in, pretty auxiliary to the big 3, is seemingly in full panic mode, prepping us for layoffs and trying to claw as much as possible from everyone.