Still trying to comprehend what’s going on here. But I’ll do my best to explain.
Context: I work in a older lumber mill. (Built in the 60’s) So we have allot of older equipment. These machines we work with are constantly breaking down and causing upset conditions.
So today as I’m coming into work our machines were running like crap (common problem they’ve been “planning” on fixing for 2 months now.) The man who was operating the machine at the time was dealing with this problem and had been clearing out the wood as part of his job to keep the machine going. These sheets of wood are over 200 pounds a piece. And they’re in Stacks of 30-50. So he’s manually moving these stacks by hand. As he finishes re-staking the entire load, He passes out either due to exhaustion or a combination of different health problem and exhaustion. At that point hits the concrete floor face first. He then lays there in blood for the next 10-15 minutes until someone finds him. The first people to arrive start CPR until the ambulance shows up. Once paramedics arrive they take over chest compressions and transport him to the hospital.
Fast forward about 30 minutes and all of day shift starts showing up. They call the entire company into a meeting to inform us what had happened. This meeting lasted about 5 minutes in which they politically tell us “this wasn’t due to unsafe conditions.” And to get back to work. All of us confused and concerned we walk back to our departments and start working. Now we’re working and the same issues keep coming up causing the same upset conditions. We’re fighting to re-stack the wood when a employee tells the boss something along the lines of “well I see we’re never going to fix this and this is what worth to the company.” The boss responded with a stereotypical political boss answer and ended with “if you guys don’t feel we support you you can shut the line down and go home.” We all look at each other take off our hard hats and walk out on him.
Not sure what happens next, or if any of us have jobs anymore. But we’ll be damned if a company is going to treat us like our life’s are expendable. I think In the end we did the right thing.
What do you guys think? Did we do the right thing? Would you ever go back?
Edit: RIP Robert you’ll be missed by all of us