My current one is pretty bad. I'm a baker and I enjoy the work but it's a small company (around 50 people) it's run by a family. There's the Owner, his brother is General Manager, wife, nephew and sister both work in the plant. The GM is a good guy and actually understands the work we do and gets his hands dirty to fix things and help us out if we need it. The family does whatever they want to (big surprise) and a few weeks ago one of them got into a huge fight with one of the Supervisors as they wanted to leave 2-3 hours ahead of everyone else but we had a few people call in sick so they were under staffed as it was. They left anyway and the rest of the team had to stay another 1-2 hours on top of the projected time.
The owner really has no idea what is happening in his plant anymore. My direct supervisor runs two lines and has around 12 people reporting to him on a daily basis, he's a good guy and extremely competent at his job, before he took over we usually had an extra 20-30% waste of time and product just getting things to work properly so we could mix. Everything runs very smoothly when he's running the lines.
The owner has been b****ing him out for months now due to the hours spent and waste due to the lines constantly breaking down due to the fact we can't get proper parts/regular maintenance on the machines. We've filed dozens of reports on everything that breaks and it still takes months for anything to be fixed. I filed a complaint about the wheels on my dough bins (that carry a minimum of 300-400 pounds every time, loading each of them with dough slamming about 20-30 times a day from a five foot drop) back in May and they just got fixed a few weeks ago, the bearings were shot, the wheels were almost falling off and we had to keep screwing the nuts back on.
The sensors for the lines are broken so we have to have a delicate jury rigging system set up to make the line work. If a certain wire gets hit the entire system shuts down, it's the same type of issue on both lines (mixing and packing) and both wires are easily hit due to the placement of them.
Best of all is four things happening at the same time
1) We have an audit for an international company happening in the next few weeks that determines if we have any contracts (read: jobs) for the next year or not and my line is 100% going to fail it and if they check certain things we could have a auto fail which could mean the plant could close.
2) The cooling tower/oven system we have setup has had so much patchwork jury rigging done that we can no longer order parts directly from the manufacturer, our lone maintenance man must WELD NEW PARTS into existence and my entire line needs a massive rewiring job which would take weeks to redo as it also is a mishmash of fixes over the years.
3) We have been told that due to a massive amount of construction happening (for the last several months) that they will not post pone any audit no matter the cause unless the entire plant is shut down for the duration so we don't even have that grace period.
And best of all
4) The owner has let it been known down the line of management that since that there is a air pressure control system in my area and that it cost alot of money that if it gets broken that he's decided that the repairs would come out of our paychecks. It just so happens to be completely out of the sight of the cameras and the construction crew has taken to parking the extremely large and unwieldy scissorlift right beside it that they drive like a half broken bus and tend to crash into things every now and then. they haven't even bothered to put back the protective guard that was stopping it from getting hit in the first place after they moved it a few months ago.
When I first heard that was his new proclamation I laughed. I thought my Sup. was kidding. If the owner had said that to us directly I would have laughed in his face just because it was completely ridiculous. The whole system costs around $7000-$10,000 to replace. If they want us to pay that then they're kidding themselves. They pay us minimum wage and just are getting insurance/benefits for the staff after being in business for over 20 years. I'm positive that there's no legal way for them to make us pay for that when they would be no way to verify who did what and that there's no preventive steps taken whatsoever.
So yeah, that be my job. I'm going in for surgery in a few days for my hands and expect to be off for a few weeks (I'm going to go friggin crazy with boredom) and I'll be looking for a new job. I love my co workers (mostly, there's several I couldn't care less about) and enjoy the job (except for the above) but I can't do this job anymore.
Edit: Sorry for the novel. Just actually writing it all out just points out exactly how much is wrong with the place. Just looking at how much is there and the stuff I didn't include tells me just how bad it's gotten. I tend to just take it all in stride and deal with the small stuff instead of the whole thing at once.
