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Strategies & Market Trends : Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis
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To: benwood who wrote (91981)12/24/2008 1:48:28 PM
From: Sunny Jim4 Recommendations  Read Replies (1) of 116555
 
Anyone who has worked on a blue collar job most likely has union stories. I remember when I was in college and got a job working one summer in the copper mines in Arizona which were unionized. Being a college student I was just a laborer so about the only tool that I was allowed to pick up was a shovel. My first day we were scooping up the concentrate in the mill that had overflowed because a ball mill broke down and they dumped the contents out on the floor. One of the wheelbarrows had a lose handle so I picked up a wrench to tighten it, and it was like I had picked up a gun. The foreman chewed my butt real good before he realized that I probably was capable of understanding that only a journeyman could use a wrench under the union rules. A couple weeks later I was assigned to work on the repair crew and one of the jobs was to repair the big electric shovels. Everyday about 2 o'clock we would get a call that a cable broke on one of the shovels, so down into the pit we went to replace it. It took about two plus hours to replace a cable. The shift ended at 4:30 so what the shovel operators would do is make a snap return on a load and a cable would break. What that got them was, off work for the day, and this happened on a pretty regular basis. I assume that management simply planned on this inefficiency when they made the production schedule. About a month into the summer the union went on strike, so I threw my hard hat in the air and headed for Wyoming where I worked for actually higher wages on a non union drilling rig the rest of the summer.
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