Update on machinist trainee

Not at all.

To put it another way Harold, what you are saying is akin to going into a bakery and saying "I want to buy a cake."

The guy behind the counter shows you one you like and you say "how much is it?"

Then he says "It's ten dollars."

You reply "it's only worth five dollars. You're asking too much. I'll only pay five dollars because I know what it's really worth."

And he says "that's my price. It's ten dollars."

It's a free market. He doesn't have to sell it for what you want to buy it for. You have to pay what he asks, or go without, or buy from another shop.

Same with labor.

Guy shows up at the shop. "I'm looking for a job, I need to get 25 per hour."

You say "this job pays only 7 per hour. You're not worth that much."

He says "thanks, but no thanks."

Because he knows he can get that much at the place down the street, same as the baker knows you cannot buy a 5 dollar cake down the street.

This is classic free market economics. What part of it would you change, and how? Again, UPS has a fully developed HR department that's paid a bunch to figure out exactly how to get the best employees for the smallest amount of money. It's what they DO.

If they went in to their boss and said "we just feel like paying a whole bunch extra so our brother-in-law can get hired into a tasty featherbed job," they'd be fired out of there so fast your head would spin. The go in there and give all those powerpoint presentations explaining exactly why they have to pay 28.000000 per hour in toledo, and they can get away with 27.99995 in tucumcari.

:^)

Jim

that averages out at $ 65 per hour ( more or less !) Alan in beautiful Golden Bay, Western Oz, South 32.25.42, East 115.45.44 GMT+8 VK6 YAB ICQ 6581610 to reply, change oz to au in address

Yes, often by more than 2:1, especially in the US, which lacks medicare for workers.

Average *wage* in Delphi's US factories is said to be US $26/hour.

They are offering the UAW "base wages of $9.50/hour for existing low production workers, $10.50/hour for high production workers, and $19/hour for skilled trades". Plus they want the workers to pay as much as $2,500/year single, or $5,000/year for family medical.

Those proposed pay rates would be similar to, say, Taiwan, in the automotive industry there.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

It ought to be that simple, but it isn't. For one thing there is the mimimum wage law. Which is a big help to some, but not necessarily the person that works for minimum wage. For example you need a ditch dug. To dig it by hand will take 20 hours. Minmum wage is $5 / hour. The guy with the backhoe charges you $100. Minimum wage is $ 7.50 and hour. The guy with the back hoe charges $150.

And then there is the equal opportunity law. Easiest to show you comply by hiring to quotas.

And then there are government contracts. They are more or less cost plus percentage contracts. Not stated as such, but never the less. So there the incentive is to hire the least productive employees and still keep the contract. Least efficent so more are employed, which means more overhead workers, the boss is over more people and gets higher salary.

Lots of distortions.

Dan

jim rozen wrote:

You seem to have no clue how the economy works. I don't claim to be an expert, but the wages have always been self leveling in any given area and are linked to inflation.

If you raise the minimum wage, this triggers inflation which raises the cost of goods, raises other wages that are above the minimum and things reach the same balance point as before where the same work will buy you the same goods, only the dollar amounts have changed.

The wages for any particular job in any particular area are directly linked to the number of people in that area that are able to do the job, the cost of housing and goods in that area and the collective minimum quality of life standards that the people who are able to do the job are willing to live with.

If workers in an are collectively decide that cleaning toilets is a lousy job and they aren't willing to do it unless it provides them with a higher quality of life standard then the wages for toilet cleaning will increase. Only when it is possible to import a steady stream of cheap labor or export the job can the wages be held down. If a steady supply of cheap labor can not be brought in then the wages will rise since once you bring that cheap labor into the area it is only a matter of time before they also demand better pay.

There is indeed a problem with work ethic in the US today, but it has little to do with "unearned money". In any true free market economy, wages will always be driven to a level that will sustain a reasonable quality of life. When the free market economy in one area is linked to economies in vastly different areas (ex. India) and to economies that are not free markets (ex. China) then the system breaks down.

Pete C.

The entire purpose of a minimum wage is to "buy" votes for a politician or political party. Due to the self leveling nature of a true free market economy any increase in a minimum wage will be erased within a year or two. Any increase in a minimum wage only serves to buy votes by providing a very short lived artificial increase in the apparent standard of living.

The problem we have now is that we are no longer in a true free market economy. With globalization and the outsourcing of jobs to countries that either have vastly different conditions or do not have free market economies at all, our economy is no longer a free market. When the wages for a give job are no longer tied to the cost of living in the area the job services, then the feedback system is broken.

Pete C.

Harold, The point wasn't that more money was going to make this guy work better. He was just one sample of people who work for a living. The point is that I believe the job was worth 14 bucks an hour. So anyone who does this job for me should earn that much. If they don't earn it then they are fired. Which is what happened. On the other hand, if the person earns the money then they keep the job. Eric

Nope. I expect to be paid a wage that will provide for a standard of living that I consider to be appropriate for the effort and skills I bring to the job. This means that I expect raises that match inflation and some additional raise that accounts for long term loyalty, reliability and continuous increase in skills.

You get the wrong impression. We have illegal immigrants harvesting our crops because in many cases they are willing to endure all kinds of abuse in order to be able to send their meager wages back to support their families who are still in another country where the meager US wage can actually support a family. Eliminate that link, have the family in the US and that wage will no longer support them and the worker will no longer be willing to work for that artificially low wage.

If he offered $50/hr vs. $14/hr he would have had more qualified candidates to choose from and would not have hired this particular one. The gamble he made was that he would be able to find a less experienced candidate that he could train to do the job and that he could pay less than he would have to pay for a candidate that already possessed the necessary skills. He lost the gamble, simple as that. If the had offered an appropriate wage for a reliable experienced machinist, he would have been able to hire one. Had his gamble paid off his profit would have been the ability to have this worker perform a given job at a lower than market rate for some period of time. He would eventually have to pay this worker the going market rate or they would leave to work somewhere else.

What we have had for too long is not too much, it has been artificially low prices for some goods due to various manipulation of the free market. If we were not able to import and abuse a continuous stream of illegal immigrants to harvest our crops we would have to pay workers a fair market market wage to do that work which would increase the cost of the food. If we were not able to export jobs we would have to pay workers in this country a fair market wage which would increase the cost of the products or services derived from those jobs.

Pete C.

You are confusing worker cost with worker wages, they are not the same thing. Worker cost includes benefits, workers comp and unemployment insurance costs, various taxes and other costs that are not part of worker wages. That $65/hr average worker cost likely equates to and average wage of $30/hr and that average is also likely very misleading with the bulk of the workers probably making $10/hr and a small number making $30/hr or similar.

Pete C.

I always recall the way a Supervisor at Chrysler would state "penalties" for same actions, or in-actions, requiring some sort of discipline....for instance, catching two employees, one senior and one junior, maybe caught smoking in a corner that was a forbidden area.... For the senior employee (one over 35), a three-day suspension

For the junior, work an extra shift, and two weekends.

I think the part that hurts most, for most of us, is that you've mis-judged a character, either as good or bad. That hurts you personally either way, and makes you somewhat self-doubting for the next go-round.

Take care.

Brian Lawson, Bothwell, Ontario.

Appropriate - based on the job and where it is located, of course.

By 'appropriate' you mean, in line with what other folks doing the same job, with the same skill set, in the same area, are being paid.

Also how motivated you are to move to another area, where the same set of conditions results in a higher pay rate.

I think the discussion of minimum wages are really a red herring here. Most of the jobs we're talking about are skilled and have larger pay rates associated with them. Minimum wage laws are one step short of welfare rules - designed to see that somebody who works can actually live on the wage.

I class them in with child labor laws.

You can make the same argument with them as with the minimum wage laws: we should abolish them, it would make more jobs overall and provides families with income.

An employer might create a job if he could hire a laborer for $1 per hour instead of being constrained by the $7 min wage rate. By the same token he would create a 50 cent per hour job for an 8-year old if he weren't constrained by the child labor laws.

So we should repeal them, too, right?

Jim

There was a research on how well interviews predict employee behavior. The question asked was whether interviewing was better at judging character than tossing a coin. Researchers conducted statistical studies, etc. I do not remember details. The result was that interviews were not better than tossing a coin.

Interviews can help find out if the person is competent or not. The best way to do it is to ask them to perform some simple task. In metalworking context, could be, let's say, asking how to produce a simple part from drawing. If I am asked to interview people, I always ask them to write a simple computer program. Then I look at what they did. That saves a lot of time, since most job seekers cannot do that.

Some people say that they know a computer language, and then we discover that they do not know it.

Wow, a burden rate of 100%? I've not seen that high a burden rate, although I'm sure with unions involved it's entirely possible. Part of my job for the past 20 years has been building cost models for contracts, and that has been for several different employers. All of those employers had burden rates of between 28% and 31%. I can't provide a cite where that rate is a national average, it's just what I've seen from experience.

Tillman

Pete, You obviously missed the point of my decision to hire the trainee in the first place. Maybe you didn't read the thread from the beginning. I wanted to pass the trade to the next generation. I think the USA needs skilled machinists. And the lack of skilled manual labor is now hurting the USA and in the future will cause even more problems. The reason I hired this guy in the first place was to teach someone to be a machinist. At least, what I know about being a machinist. He would eventually have to work at other shops to get a better education. So the gamble was not that I thought I could train someone for cheap and reap the rewards of this cheap labor. The gamble was whether the guy would learn and whether he would put forth the effort to give me 40 hours a week of his time while I paid him to both make parts and to learn the trade. In fact, I lost money on several of the jobs he did. I expected this. I had planned for this. That's why I carefully interviewed him and why I called his last employer. He was enthusiastic at first, but after a while it apparently was too much to ask him to be at the shop 40 hours a week. Hopefully the next person I hire will have a better work ethic. In the future please make sure that you really know what you are talking about when you assign motives to me. Eric R Snow, E T Precision Machine

Greetings Brian, It did bother me that the guy's character didn't show. To me. It mat be that I'm not such a good judge of character. So the next hire will have to prove to me that they are worth the investment. But this experience will not deter me from trying again to pass the machinist trade on to another generation. Cheers, Eric

Eric, your experience is not unusual, do not beat your head over it. It is hard to be a good judge of character at interviews and most people are not such. I am sorry if I missed something, but did you check his references? School grades? Knowledge of some basic math? Anything that shows that he accomplished at least anything, anywhere?

I am a bad judge of character and try to rely on measurable things.

You just touched on the point I was trying to make. If I were to move to a different area where the same job would net me an apparent higher wage, the reality of the situation is that the cost of living in that area would also be higher so the net result would be the same standard of living for the same work.

Minimum wage laws are nothing more than politicians buying votes. Any minimum wage increase results in a year or so of phony bubble in the apparent standard of living while the market forces via inflation re-balance the economy so that the net result is exactly the same work to standard of living balance as before. The numbers go up in both the wage and then cost of living, but the ratio remains the same.

Not even remotely similar.

The only argument I make re: minimum wage laws is that they are nothing more than a political trick to buy votes from the gullible.

Nope, the employer would simply drop wages for the existing workers to the lowest level he can get away with. An employer will only create new jobs when there is additional market for their products or services

An employer will pay as little as they can while being able to hire workers who are able to do the job and don't have too high a rate of turnover. An employer who tries to pay less than the area market demands for a particular job will suffer with low worker productivity and high turnover.

Jobs are not ever created simply because an employer can hire more people for the same money. No business that lasts more than a few months expands unless there is additional demand for their commodity.

An entirely different thing from wages.

Pete C.

It sounds like what you are really pointing out, without realizing it, is that our economy can only function by exploiting some fraction of the workforce: ie, paying them less than the cost of living.

If that's true, we'll have a problem as soon as the various games we play to deny it catch up with us.

Yes and that is also a form of profit. It may not be cash in your pocket, but you would still have gained by accomplishing something that made you feel good. It's certainly a worthy goal.

Absolutely.

Big time. I try to maintain as diverse a skill set as I can.

Not in your case, but certainly a common situation. In your case you were looking for a different form of profit.

Low productivity for a short while is inherent to just about every new employee. Even the most qualified still need some time to adapt to the new environment and it's process flow.

Interviews and even contacting a previous employer don't necessarily give you a good picture. Besides the obvious fact that previous employers are afraid of giving any subjective assessment of the employee, good or bad for fear of lawsuits, employees are not static and life situations can change drastically (good and bad) between jobs making the previous assessment worthless.

Big personal problems can occur that hurts an employees performance even though at their previous job their performance was stellar. By the same token, big personal problems that cause poor performance on a previous job and be resolved and the employees performance on the new job may be stellar.

The motive still remains profit, even if it is emotional vs. monetary.

Pete C.