but to show you the other side since you obviously don't have a clue where the true pressures lie.
Dude, two weeks ago, during one three day period, I worked 29.5 hours out of the available 36 hours, with 3 hours of sleep between days 1 and 2. Day 2 consisted of 20.5 hours of work, *non-stop*.
While that was probably the heaviest three day schedule I've ever put in, as a self-employed accountant for 10 years, most years have seen at least a dozen days where I'd start at 9AM, then work virtually non-stop until 6 the next morning, for a 21 hour shift. Every job has deadlines and production required by someone, whether it be your direct boss, a customer, a government dead-line which won't pass without substantial monetary penalty, etc.
And I have also worked the other side (blue collar), my friend. As an $8.50 per hour construction worker, I lost 100% vision in my left eye due to a ricocheting nail from a pneumatic 16-penny nail gun.
Nobody said your father was a whiner. My point is that these employees are taking down $69K a year (an average of reg pay plus overtime of roughly $34.50/hour) plus another $21K in benefits. Yet those wages are due to "outmoded work rules", which require GM to pay overtime often for time over 5 to 6 hours of work per day. Certainly they have a right to strike for whatever reason they want to, but according the story linked by lisa, the union agreed under the terms of their most recent contract to reform outmoded work rules. The union reneged on the work rules, and then went on strike when GM decided they would also renege on the amount of money agreed to be spent on new equipment. The bottom line is, a factory has to have a positive bottom line, and no matter how long those workers stay on strike, they aren't going to convince management that it's well and good to continue running a factory at a loss.
Perhaps instead of mentioning "whining", a more polite term would have been "wake up and smell the coffee".
But I used the term "whining" only after being told on this thread to "go back to playing croquet". |
