I had a great boss, great union, and great company. When it got bought out, the new owners did a ton of shady shit. Told the union to shove off and they would replace all of us if need be. Well, our 3rd week into their new bullshit, like skip these check lists, ignore this sound, or don’t replace that dead light, we all said fuck it and left. Most of our equipment had no manuals or instructions. The machines I ran only had two people who new them, me and the person that trained me. Funny thing was he was a union steward and was training me to replace him as both a steward and a machinist.
They instantly hired scabs to show us we were not needed, and that cost them several million dollars because no one trained them. One scab set my machine to maximum speed and tried to run a second on as well. The guy destroyed a 50k piece, blew the hydraulics on the main machine, cracked the arm on the main machine, and in a panic left the second machine running which caused it the bunch up material and break as well. We were all payed for nearly a month to come to work and do nearly nothing because they said we were replaceable and let untrained people break most of our important machines to prove that.
They still tried to tell us our daily checks were costing the company money, and all the machinist would smile and ask how much it was to fix our machines again? In the end we all got a raise, the shop was back to running safely, we got double time for our mandatory ot for a month after things were fixed, and the union demanded a raise outside of normal negotiations since the company technically fired all of us. Good times.