tailgater wrote:As a small manufacturing company, there is an issue with hiring new people directly. Anyone can work 2 days and then have an "injury" from the manufacturing floor.
To help minimize this risk, we hire through a temp agency and let people know that we'll hire them direct after 60 days.
For our $15/hour (to the agency) we get obvious drug users who have physical ailments when separated from their smart phone and cigarettes for more than 2 hours at a time.
We get people who get bored with the job, while somehow not having enough time to clean up their area.
It's not intelligence. They're smart enough. They simply don't want to work because it's easier to collect. And when they quit through the temp agency, they DO collect.
Of course, we do get some great people. My assessment was a generalization, but the good ones tend to be the exceptions that prove the rule.
though my department has remained amazingly stable, perhaps because I do not have any workers via the temp agency, I see what goes on nearby in our mill/assembly areas and it is very similar to your experience, lots of bottom feeders mixed in with a few quality people who somehow ended up in the temp labor pool but have pride in their work.
The owner is willing to go that route and pay $15 because it ends up less costly than minimum wage with benefits and risks attached. But he has to keep turning over personnel and that delays the mastering of those positions. That creates other costly issues.
I have to say from several years of observing the changes we have gone through, we were way more efficient when we used full time people at these jobs and had a fraction of the "do-overs" that are killing us and profit today...but I have no way of assessing if our net is better or worse now than then, but it "feels" like we have more waste and more leaks now.
I strongly suspect we were in better shape under the old model, when the same guy ran the same machine for a long time and had a sense of belonging to the finished product that ended up in people's homes. He would never have pushed a broken product further down the conveyor belt but felt an obligation to prevent it from shipping etc. etc.
I guess for our company at least, it isn't what people are worth, it's what certain jobs are paying locally...and rather than
push for minimum (or maximum) wages, I'd say in my experience the old maxim is king...You Get What You Pay For.
