If, like me, you thought the only people still being paid for doing nothing were academics and government workers, and that industry, especially in the US, had been pared to the bone....
FLINT, Mich. -- All day, Judy Rowe sits in a room at a large, old Delphi Corp. auto parts plant here, reading, sewing or staring into space.
For this she earns $31.80 an hour.
There are 70 people in this room, all employed by Michigan-based Delphi and protected by the United Auto Workers union. They clock in at 6 a.m. and clock out at 2:30 p.m.
But there is nothing for them to do.
"I think I'm slipping into a depression," said Rowe, who has been languishing for six years in this strange and very unique form of unionized employment limbo known as the jobs bank.
If there was work to do, they would be on the manufacturing lines. But there isn't. And they can't be laid off because their union contracts include this unique provision.
The jobs bank is a bullpen of sorts for surplus workers. It was designed two decades ago as a temporary haven that has become a permanent and expensive catch basin for declining auto industry companies.
There are 4,000 workers in the jobs bank at Delphi, which has filed for bankruptcy, and an additional 6,300 in the jobs banks at struggling Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Corp. There are 2,500 more at Chrysler.
At the Delphi East plant in Flint, they get their full salaries for sitting in a large room. They get a lunch break. At other jobs banks, employees are allowed to do community service.
This system has never been seriously challenged, despite the extraordinary cost of carrying idle workforces that earn not just their pay but accrue benefits, vacation time and seniority credits
Rest of this is here:
www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-0602120482feb1...y
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If, like me, you thought the only people still being paid for doing nothing were academics and government workers,
I never thought that actually. If I did I'd just be (at best) very badly informed and probably just a bigot.
Sniping at public sector workers and unions seems to be a pretty common theme on this forum.
If you think 'academics' do nothing then I suggest you have had little to do with academia.
For about 10 years I have sat on the 'industrial liaison committee' of a university engineering department. We (i.e. a group of 'outsiders' working in the engineering industries) meet about three times a year and advise the engineering department on course content and the needs of industry. All I can say is that those guys in the university work at least as hard as anyone I've met in the automotive industry. And their salaries are a lot lot lower than they could earn outside of academia. In fact, unsurprisingly, many have left academia to work in industry. Go into many university science and engineering depts these days and you will find that the majority of the newer staff are from India, China and the Middle East - they are the only ones willing to work very hard for the relatively low pay and status. In fact it is a fair bet that virtually ALL the research staff will be from outside the EU. And once they have been here long enough to get UK residency status then they too clear off into industry.
Sorry for the slight rant, but this kind of ill-informed sniping does nothing for UK PLC. What UK universities need right now is a whopping great injection of cash into science and engineering departments to re-equipe them and pay decent salaries to attract the best staff and bring us back to 'world standard'.
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You're about 30 years behind the times. Academics operate in a competitive market. There are very few jobs and a large proportion of them (40%+) work on temporary and part-time contracts. My wife--a high-flier in her field--just spent a week applying for a research grant she is unlikely to get; at PhD-funding level undergraduate degrees are graded High First, Middle First, Low First, and only some of the High Firsts get the money (about £7000 a year on average)--it's easier than that in sciences and engineering, incidentally. At the bottom end of the actual job market many earn less than £12,000 a year for teaching and fund their research themselves--really. Pay is low for most of them, even on full-time salaries; in fact the school teacher starting salary (dodgy degree from dodgy university plus one year teaching qualification) is higher than an academic starting salary (PhD minimum). They do it because industry wouldn't pay for the blue sky research they do, yet this is the research that we benefit from in 10, 20, or 50 years.
If a private company is dumb enough to pay people to do nothing then it deserves to go bust. British universities have traditionally worked the other way around in my experience. They are now in deep trouble and need a lot of money fast.
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Well said Baskerville! Most people haven't got a clue how modern academia works and how poorly paid these people are relative to their contribution to the country. Really winds me up when I see an ill informed blast of flatulence like that at the top...
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in fact the school teacher starting salary (dodgy degree from dodgy university plus one year teaching qualification)
Why did you have to say that? OK, certain parts of the country are short of teachers in certain subjects, but it's generally a very competitve environment. My daughter has a 2.1 from a 'proper' Russell group Uni and she was one of the very few of her Uni friends who wanted to go into teaching who got a job straight off.
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>> My daughter has a 2.1 from a 'proper' Russell group Uni and she was one of the very few of her Uni friends who wanted to go into teaching who got a job straight off.
I think he was just making the point how poorly paid academics are compared to school teachers.
To have any chance of becoming an academic you would need a good first degree and then a PhD. After that you would need a good track record of publication and of bringing money in from sponsors/industry. This would only be achieved by working hard for long hours on a temporary contract with very low pay. You then may get the offer of the odd interview for a permanent position. You will be in your early thirties by this time.
IF you then get offered a permanent position you would likely start on the same pay as a school teacher about 10 years younger, with fewer qualifications. Bear in mind that for most 'career' academics the pay tops out at around £35k - and for that you would be expected to be an 'international' expert in a subject, producing good quality publications year in, year out and attracting funding.
The pay in FE colleges is even more derisory. These are guys who are teaching the motor technicians of the future and even toward the end of their career they may be earning no more than the *starting* salary of a school teacher.
I really do fear for the future of this country. We accord more respect and financial reward to 'non-value-adding' occupations like law, accountancy and property sales. People who are genuinely creating wealth through innovation and invention, like academics, are at the bottom of the pile.
It something I feel very strongly about, over the last 20-30 years we have witnessed the intellectual and technological foundations of this once great country being undermined and left to decay.
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No offence intended. I was listing minimum qualifications. It is true that many use teaching as a last resort job.
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I was once a civil servant, and whilst I would refute the claim that we got paid for doing nothing, I have to say that there wer tons of union-created scams to bump up the meagre pay packet.
For instance, if we worked 5 minutes after our normal going home time, we automatically got paid 2 hrs overtime. Also, if we worked 5 minutes after midnight, we automatically got paid till 06:00 at double time.
Again, if our work impinged on the lunch hour by a few minutes, we used to get a fully paid lunch-hour as overtime.
So I have to say that any government or public sector workers should stop and think of the pressure some employees are now under that work for some of the large multi-national organisations. The pay may be good, but there is no feeling of permanence whatsoever.
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Public sector pay is pathetic, it amazes me that we have any teachers, nurses etc in this country.
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The OP cited a case that would have seemed all too familiar in this country twenty or thirty years ago: boneheaded union/management line-of-least-resistance collusion leading to no profit leading to (for example) the very slow and agonizing collapse of British Leyland. Fleet Street in the old days was another case in point. Most of that has now been swept away and replaced by the insecurity cited by Roly above. Part of the process has involved destroying industries with strong union structures (e.g. coal, steel, shipbuilding) and letting the work go to poorer countries or better-organized, more rational rich ones. More or less simultaneously, inefficient public sector industries have been flooded with useless accountants (health) or privatised (railways) making them much more expensive and significantly less efficient. We are not better off as a result of these changes although they were more or less inevitable.
It's a great relief that Aprilia can be provoked into ranting a bit! The rant itself more or less completely justified in my opinion. British anti-intellectualism has an up side but its down side is predominant.
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It's up to the Government to sort it out.
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It's a great relief that Aprilia can be provoked into ranting a bit! The rant itself more or less completely justified in my opinion. British anti-intellectualism has an up side but its down side is predominant.
Yes, its not often that I rant, is it?
If fact this thread reminded me of a university 'industrial liaison committee' meeting I went to about a year ago. They wanted us to look at their long-term strategy for the engineering dept.
It was noted that there is a lot of pressure to recruit academics from abroad (India & China) on account of the fact that they are much cheaper and more 'compliant' than UK staff (we were informed that young foreign academics, because they don't usually have family here, are much more likely to work over the weekend!). We were also told the foreign students bring about twice as much income as UK students and therefore should be preferentially admitted. We therefore concluded that the 'ideal' British university would be staffed by foreigners and teach foreigners! Funny old world, isn't it?
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And now back to motoring please.
DD.
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> British anti-intellectualism has an up side
Which is?
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If you ever try to read a translation of a text by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, for example, or anything written by a British literary or film critic who thinks that charlatan worth quoting, it will bring out the skinhead in you in a very healthy manner. There are many similar examples that could be cited. If Aprilia has ever scanned any of these documents he may agree.
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Sorry DD. Perhaps I should have quoted the late LJK Setright in high-flying literary mode...
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In the old DDR my wife worked for a company making lamp shades except they never had any material she started 6.00am they talked about what they were going to achieve that day as per party line and then went home at 14.00 after making nothing to queue for something ,you always queued for something.She also repaired Trabant body panels for a while but they never had any paint.
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Shealso repaired Trabant body panels for a while but they never had any paint.
Hardboard or something, weren't they? Probably made in a lampshade factory to start with.
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Compressed anything stuck to a metal space frame never rusted and extremely strong ,I have a Kugle(Trabant Conertible) with a polo engine and discs brakes in the garage might be worth something oneday.
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Compressed anything stuck to a metal space frame never rusted and extremely strong ,I have a Kugle(Trabant Conertible) with a polo engine and discs brakes in the garage might be worth something oneday.
Must have frayed a bit round the edges surely? Even so, nothing wrong with using unconventional materials, the cheaper the better as long as they do the job.
I didn't know there were Trabant hot rods. Still don't think I'll be looking for one somehow though!
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I was once a civil servant, and whilst I would refute the claim that we got paid for doing nothing, I have to say that there wer tons of union-created scams to bump up the meagre pay packet. For instance, if we worked 5 minutes after our normal going home time, we automatically got paid 2 hrs overtime. Also, if we worked 5 minutes after midnight, we automatically got paid till 06:00 at double time. Again, if our work impinged on the lunch hour by a few minutes, we used to get a fully paid lunch-hour as overtime.
My wife *IS* a Civil Servant - she's on Flexitime and no work they do is paid at overtime rates. Flexitime sounds good, but is used by management to rota people in early and send then home late.So I have to say that any government or public sector workers should stop and think of the pressure some employees are now under that work for some of the large multi-national organisations. The pay may be good, but there is no feeling of permanence whatsoever.
My wife's been lucky and has been able to move on to other jobs as offices have closed. But the office she's in now has been earmarked for closure and that looks like the end of the line for her. Ten of thousands of civil servants have been quietly mad redundant over the last couple of years. They're just ordinary (pretty low paid) working people like most other people.
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I don't know of any scams of this type, when I was a civil servant, unless it was for the so-called industrial grades. In fact, many people worked considerable amounts of unpaid overtime, under pressure to reach deadlines.
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I don't know of any scams of this type, when I was a civil servant, unless it was for the so-called industrial grades. In fact, many people worked considerable amounts of unpaid overtime, under pressure to reach deadlines.
The officials in Whitehall with whom I have dealings all work long hours, mostly on quite low pay, and always without overtime or perks. Last year, I had a lot of dealings with an official taking lead responsibility for implementing an Act of Parliament. He was working twelve hour days, and was often at his desk on weekends too. For that he got no overtime pay and no time off in lieu, and had no prospect of a bonus. His ultimate reward was a transfer sideways to a post with better prospects.
That man was under unusual pressure, but it's hard to find a Whitehall officials who is able to approach their job as a 9-5 task. They no longer have the job security they used to have, and are not well paid compared with simlar posts in the private sector.
I think it's a pity that some people seem to enjoy slurring our public servants as featherbedded layabouts. Most of them are hard-working folks with a strong commitment to serving the public.
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Thread locked. Seems some of you didn't understand my earlier message.
DD.
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