Unbelievable Shit
Pay attention to the news the next few weeks, those of you who are in the DFW area. You may very well see me and the other drafters from work on strike. Why? Many reasons. Those grievances against the company are hereby listed below:
(keep in mind, while reading, that our pay period is from Thurs-Wed)
1. If you are going to pay as little as possible to the employees, you should at least have SOME form of insurance offered. Do you? NO. A SALESMAN had to bring in a buddy of his from an insurance company to try to calm the company down a little. Let me tell you, the least you could do was welcome them with open arms and made a deal with them to offer lower rates. What money we do make would, if we chose to take them, would go directly into their greedy pockets.
2. Is it so much to ask that we make a decent wage? I understand that we may not all be qualified by collegic standards, but we know AutoCAD to a T and we know the database and we know what the fuck is going on! Hell, the guy who got me my job has been with you for SIX FUCKING YEARS and IS JUST NOW getting another 50c "raise" to an even $20/hr! THAT’S FUCKING BULLSHIT! I made that AS AN ENTRY LEVEL EMPLOYEE at my previous employer! The guy who sits next to me has been with you a little over a year now and is BARELY making $12.50/hr! Why not hire a completely staffed section of highschool employees? You’re already halfway there! FUCK! The PART-TIME employees make more per hour than the guy next to me! AND THEY WORK HALF THE TIME!
3. You wish to employ more people, therefore you CUT over time OUT of our shrinking list of possibilities? That makes NO FUCKING SENSE! Which works out better, paying one person time and a half at $13/hr (best scenario pay scale), or paying two people $13/hr? For a 40/hr week, you pay out twice as much as before, but, no! You’re looking at overtime as well! One person working overtime for one file is roughly 46hrs, which is $637 pretaxes. Paying two people to share a file at EXACTLY 40hrs pays out $1040 for that week, or roughly $520/person pretaxes. How does that save you money? And with the new policy in place, we are not allowed to clock in before 8am, yet you expect us AT OUR DESKS, ALREADY CLOCKED IN, READY TO WORK, AT EIGHT! Now we have mandatory ONE HOUR lunches? It was nice with a mandatory half-hour lunch with maximum allotted time set at one hour, but docking us the minutes we don’t stay away for the full hour? Counterproductive on SO many levels! And shall I begin with today’s announcement, at noon, "Those of you who have already clocked your forty hours, get your ass out"? By three today, there were roughly 6 of 18 drafters still click-clacking our keyboards. I missed half-day on Friday, and being yelled at because I’m still fumbling with my belongings AT FIVE FIFTEEN because I haven’t left yet DOESN’T allow me to make up those four hours I need to even REACH my required 40. And I hope you’re happy, I didn’t make my 40, which means my paycheck this Friday will be quite small and I will be lucky to be able to pay for fuel after bills are paid.
Oh, wait, you want to keep money out of our pockets while you line yours with as much of the good green as possible. Greedy bastards.
4. The "teams" you put us on cause nothing but trouble. We compete to put things into production, however if the salesmen don’t sell, we don’t produce. Not to mention that salesmen are unfairly divided among the teams, some teams (like mine) have ALL new people and two veterans under one bitch who knows NOTHING about leading a group of people, and the work is unfairly balanced upon those teams that are weaker. Our quota each quarter hovers around $700,000 of drawings, and with record breaking sales the last two quarters, our expected quota has risen, not taking into account the weaker teams BARELY scraping by. And the "rewards"? JUST for making quota, a team gets "bonuses". These are a load of crap. It started with the winning team getting $3000 to split among the members. That was fine. Now it’s shifted to simply making quota gets you a minimum $50 "bonus". The higher up you are in the team structure, the more money you get, and the "winning team" gets nearly a double paycheck. We rake in a MINIMUM of 2.1MILLION each quarter, and all we get is an extra paycheck? Where’s our .5% of that 2.1MILLION? That’s a MINIMUM of $10500.00 to split among roughly 18 people, a MINIMUM of $600 a drafter! This $50 minimum simply for making quota is bullshit. Our quota gets you millions a quarter.
5. I don’t owe you a gawddamn bit of loyalty. If I hear that fucking lecture one more fucking time, I’m going to scream! I took this job because at the time, no one else would hire me. Same goes for 90% of the rest of the drafters. Not to mention that to expect loyalty you must be loyal. You are only loyal to the upper management. We work our asses off and they sit on their high thrones and fill their pockets. MILLIONS. WE, the drafters, put MILLIONS into production each quarter. Salesmen see 9.5% of that in commission (a load of bullshit), our supervisor (who does NOTHING) sees .5% of that as a quarterly bonus. That .5% is SUPPOSED to be divided among the DRAFTING DEPARTMENT, not stop with the drafting director! We see NOTHING for our hard work except the heel of your boot, and you expect us to be loyal? Fuck that!
Keep in mind that these are simply my rants against the company. I’m sure that once us drafters get together for our final organizational meeting, this list will expand. I’ve been there six months, some have been there six years. A few longer than that. One thing we all agree on: something has GOT to change.
