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SW OH | I'm in the operating engineers union, but I'm a class 30, which is B scale. Lead Greaseman is my fancy title, but I'm a grease monkey. I work under the heavy highway agreement just the same as operators on the job. I like the job itself. I'm outdoors, drive a company truck home, work hours that suit me, (2-3 AM till noonish most days) work on and operate (to warm up and maneuver) machines of kinds up to EX1200s, Manitowoc 4600, Metso LT150, etc, down to skid steers, broom tractors, and every day is something different. I get paid well. I usually get laid off 2-3 weeks for Christmas and new year's. That only happens because the mechanics in the shop do get paid holidays. Holidays are not paid if you are laid off and I get lumped into shop policies.
There are other fringe benefits to me as well such as borrowing shop tools and being at the right place and time when things get pitched.
The only thing I HATE about my job is my boss. For 15 years me and the other grease monkey maintained 800 pieces of equipment without anybody telling us where to go and what to work on. We averaged 6.X oil changes a day and around 20,000 miles a year on our trucks. We now have an idiot that has never been a mechanic, never changed the oil in anything, does not know where anything in the company is or how to get there, does not know why oil gets changed, does not know the time and space required to do an oil change, and this man makes our schedule. If we do anything other than his schedule or do it in a different way we get a stern lecture about how we don't know what we are doing and we don't see the "big picture". Under his direction we average around 3 oil changes a day and 30-40,000 miles a year on our trucks. His solution is we need 3 people doing this. There have been 5, third wheels in the last 5 years. 4 have quit because they couldn't stand him, the 5th was fired after 3 wrecks in 6 weeks costing the company over $400,000. My boss wanted to keep him, his boss said no. My coworker and I have explored other jobs and had talked about quitting together. No one else in the company can do or wants to learn how to do what we do. I think if we both threatened to quit because of our boss, they would fire him. He was the shop superintendent before his current position. He was removed from the shop by the HR department for the way he treated the mechanics. Our union told the mechanics it was an internal problem and was none of their business. With the paid holidays and a change in they way we are paid have put those thoughts on hold, at least for now.
Mitchco | |
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Rail strike
