When I first applied for a this job, I was told my schedule would be from 6:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., Monday-Friday. I was overjoyed, as I haven't had a job that left my weekends free for five years, and I was looking forward to finally getting to spend some time with my family. Also, the $12 per hour wages for the work seemed very reasonable, considering how easy the work was, as was the $18 overtime compensation for any hours worked over the initial forty.
Unfortunately, Challenge Manufacturing Plant 7 in Kansas City, Missouri is utterly incapable of producing the daily quota of Chevy Malibu parts that its customer, General Motors, expects from it. They have a seven-year contract with GM and desperately want to renew it after it expires (although I think it will be a miracle if they even keep the one they have). Therefore, we are forced to work from 5:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., seven days a week, in an effort to produce those totally unattainable part quotas. On my first day of work I was told by my immediate supervisor that she hadn't had a single day off in three months. Workers drop like flies here. The turnover rate is phenomenal.
The reason for Challenge's dismal production (besides the fact that their "management" is the most inept, out-of-touch group of sycophantic slave drivers I've ever had the displeasure of working for) is that their robots, especially the ones that assemble the main components, break down constantly. I've worked days where the robots were down all day and didn't start working until a half-hour before shift change. Four hours of downtime is quite normal, while we usually have a minimum of two hours of downtime while the robots are getting fiddled with by the overworked (and amazing) maintenance team.
What's so infuriating about this is that the sociopathic management (which keeps getting shuffled around and replaced) blames the workers for the poor production, rather than the robots. They've cut our breaks down to what must be illegal durations for the hours worked. In an eleven-hour day, we get two ten-minute breaks and one half-hour lunch (the latter of which, as with most places of work, we aren't paid for). In an eight-hour day, we only get one ten-minute break and a lunch. Now, check this out: we aren't allowed to leave our work stations until the exact minute our break starts, and we have to be back at our stations on the last minute of our break. And this plant is HUGE, alright? It takes about two-and-a-half minutes just to walk to the break area. So basically you get a six-minute break and a 26-minute lunch. And during that lunch, you aren't allowed to go anywhere, even though you're not getting paid for that time. There's a Wendy's next door, but you're not allowed to go. And to make their Draconian measures complete, Challenge has even forbidden its employees to smoke, even outside, even in their own cars, during the work day. Henry Ford would have been proud of these authoritarians. And then when we run back to our stations to be back on time, we end up sitting there for an hour anyway, because the robots are down.
Another mind-blowing thing I've seen here is the Quality Control process. There are people who all day grab completed parts off the conveyor belt, draw a few lines on them with a blue magic marker, and put them into bins to be shipped out to the GM plant. This is what constitutes Quality Control at Challenge. I once had to work at a QC station, and the person I was working with showed me where to draw the lines on the part. When I asked her what the marks meant or what I was supposed to be looking for, she just shrugged and said, "I don't know. It's something about the weld or something." A friend of mine worked for a day at another QC station, and when he found a messed-up weld on a part, he went to the guy who usually worked that station and asked what to do with it. The guy had no idea. He'd been working there for a month and had never really looked hard enough at a part to find any faults with it. He had to go ask his supervisor. Considering they are producing car parts and families will be driving in these cars, you'd think maybe QC should be taken seriously, right?
I could say a lot of other things that I've seen go on there but this isn't the forum for that. Let's just say Challenge Manufacturing is a company with absolutely no morals or scruples, and they'd better hope GM doesn't look to closely into their dealings.
