Hello all
This might be a bit of a rant and I am new to Reddit as well.
I want to make it clear that I am not anti-work but more anti-exploitation and simply just treating others as individuals with huge amounts of potential.
Anyways, I work in a fabrication plant with stone and work as a design engineer. I have been working for almost a year and I have noticed a lot of issues.
- Our boss expects our machines to literally run 24/7. Anyone knows with any fabrication experience knows that any piece of machinery will have around 80-85% capacity on weekdays and weekends is around 25-40% (depending on what is running). Literally got a call from higher-ups wondering why one of our robots isn't running. It is just crazy to think that he would want us to drop everything we are doing ON THE WEEKEND to do what he wants. I get we are salary workers, but we also have lives. This is one reason why I do not have my work email on my phone.
- We seem to literally have all of our projects last minute. I do not understand why we can't just schedule our jobs. I made a schedule for a job I was in charge of and they were shocked that I added in buffer time (ie. things that can go wrong, extra programming for machines, machine breaking down, etc) and they told me that I should not factor those into my schedule. This was probably the single dumbest sentence I have heard from my company and shows they do not know how to schedule jobs.
- Our company does not invest the money back into resources. I have noticed that they hardly buy new equipment, new staff, or anything updated to save money but then they wonder why shit keeps breaking down. Like they refuse to buy someone in the shipping dept a $2,500 table saw to help him make shipping crates. It blows my mind that they cannot just reinvest their revenue into the equipment. They wonder why we can never get anything done on time.
- Overall, the owner is not the smartest person and has no idea about anything that is going on. We keep switching between various jobs and it's hard to focus on getting one done when you are doing 3-4 at a time. Literally, the priority for a job goes 0-100 because he is afraid to talk to the clients when they are having questions he cannot answer or isn't good news. Like that is his job lol.
- I asked for more PTO from one of my directors and they couldn't give it to me (for context I have 2 weeks/10 days). I want to travel and I was willing to work overtime to make up for the lost hours. Basically, the conversation was they could not do it because the salary of people working overtime doesn't really matter, since we are salary. It rubbed me the wrong way for her to say that. So basically any overtime we do doesn't matter? Then why would I ever do anything extra for your company? If you don't appreciate any extra effort I do, then I won't do anything extra.
Overall, I really like the innovation of work we do and different thinking but these glaring issues are just such a turn-off and piss me off. I have no idea what to do. I have set my boundaries very clearly on not working every single weekend unless they pay me more.
Please let me know what you think because I have been thinking about this for a while and it has been driving me crazy.
Thank you other fellow redditors!