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Man, I tell ya 50 hour weeks really takes it’s toll on your expendable time. Then you got the people outside of work asking you to work on their cars too. Remember Eric’s video about having mechanical skills being like having magical powers? Lol.
In any case people seem to love to ignore their MIL quite a bit. At least 17 cars with a flamboyant issue have come in for ROUTINE maintenance (oil change, rotation, tune-up) this week alone so far with the MIL on. It helps up-selling, but I wonder why these people are so oblivious to major issues and the work orders rarely say “perform diag on codes”. I tell ya, some people. Transmission making grinding noises? Just ignore it and turn the radio up :angry:
In any case, tomorrow I have two side jobs lined up…on my day off lol
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Chevyman21 wrote: theres hourly techs and then theres flat rate techs…
This maybe a little off subject, but I figured I can put my input (belly aching) in on my dealership flat rate tech experience.
I was a flat rate tech for 38 years at GM and Ford dealerships that were Union shops that had a guaranteed 40 work week, but you had to make the 40 hrs. by factory flat rate time. The last 25 years it was really hard to make 40 hrs. even for the young people. But of course you had some techs that got more brake / suspension work that made it plus more….I still think those techs were paying the service writers off the get the easier work.
If you didn’t make the 40 hrs. after three weeks; you got a reprimand letter and was guaranteed 32 hrs. pay and your flat rate was reduced to 32 hrs. When that happened you mostly got all the low paying heavy work with the service writer thinking anybody can make 32 hrs. If you got a Duramax/Power Stoke engines,3.6 Equinox /STS/Camaro engines, 4.6/5.3 F150 Engines, Fusion Transmissions…ect ect ect…it was hard to get 32 hrs.
The next step was second reprimand letter and guaranteed 24 hrs. I got to this point one time when I had a comeback on a Duramax 3500 and a STS 3.6. I was back flagged all the hrs. that I was given for the labor operations in one week and had to address the comebacks for straight time.
Just in case you want know what happens if you can’t make the 24 hrs under factory flat rate… third reprimand letter and you’re looking for a job.
As for what the Union did, they saved my job one time on a comeback which was very obvious another tech was trying to make it look like what I did caused the comeback. The second time I wasn’t so lucky, after 38 yrs. I did what someone in management said to do and later they said they didn’t say that and yes they were a trusted friend.
What did the Union do…they came to the dealership during my termination and the owner slammed the door in the Rep’s face. Later on after a grievance meeting and the dealer refused to reinstate me, the Union said they were going to arbitration. What happened, the Union tried to find me another job along with me trying to find one, being 62 yrs old, I took retirement. What happen about the arbitration… after a year it’s still pending….I wonder who’s paying who off. The Union has suggested I get an Attorney and file suite for age discrimination. My question to the Union was; what have I been paying you for all these years?
Now after some of the shock has worn off, I’m helping some people that can’t afford to get their cars worked on…. Most of which are disabled Veterans.
JTF as a disabled vet myself I want to thank you for what you do to help veterans get back to helping themselves.
I was a cable tech before I worked as an engineer. In both fields we had feast and famine work. My wife is a nurse her field is often feast or famine. and everyone in the retail field can have unseasonably long high periods, and low periods.
Long before I ever started this field I knew and understood that everything has high and low times. Even in engineering the peak times for work mimicked peak times for the medical field and for the auto repair industry. I’ve always been a bit perceptive to small things. Like two cars in the service bays 6 stalls apart and have license plates that are only different by one number.
The current trend I see is giving hourly lube techs all the work they can do, and giving the flag hours to the dealership not a tech. So the management gets bigger bonuses. Then the shop foreman starts pushing techs to do high pressure, high volume sales tactics to service writers often when vehicles don’t need or require the service. Then when customers refuse to come back and be hassled the managers blame the techs for not selling the proper service and refuse to move them up, and at times write up reprimands.
I laugh when 20 year old kids at work try to tell older techs they are wrong about how they are fixing something. And how the field works. The forum is pretty good about policing know it all kids that come on here. But we get a few.
We have a lube tech that claims he knows more about cars than anyone in our shop. He runs his own shop repairing cars but he’s a lube tech because he needs a taxable income and doesn’t need the money he makes working at our dealership.
The other day he told our master tech he was doing a long block the wrong way and was going way to fast. The lube tech was politely told the mind his own business and find some oil to play with.Yet the genius shop foreman we have thinks the lube tech is going to be a high producer for flag hours. So nothing is said to the kid and he continues to create more rifts between sage techs and young guys looking for a mentor.
[quote=”DaFirnz” post=147751]I’m about 10kms west of the geographic middle, think Winnie the pooh. I work for a group with an east Indian sounding name. Apparently there’s a few different cousins with their own groups across the country. The group in Vancouver is particularly large, but there is no direct association. Or so they say, I’m pretty sure they all have the same hack and slash approach to anything that is on the other side of “the wall of caring”.
You see in our building there is a single uninterrupted wall that runs the width of the building and it separates the shop and service drive from everything else. Everything on the other side upper management cares about, sales, leasing, even our parts department got the shop closed for a whole fucking day so they could do inventory. They seriously might have a thousand square feet of space and they never have anything more than brakes in stock. Oh, and nobody thought to tell us until the day before at about 10AM. Everything on the other side of the wall, we’re treated like a parasite that the host has to keep alive to ensure their own survival.
Ya, there’s been enough shit going on in the last month that resumes have been sent out.[/quote]
My last dealership was exactly like that. They give away sales and expect the service department to make up several hundred thousand dollars in lose revenue when people don’t come in for service. They are run by people from Ohio. They just got into auto sales in the 60’s when you could sell a farmer his own dirt. And their approach has never changed. Now they are trying to compete with dealers that have kept up with the times. I interviewed with a Chevy dealership that told me they do roughly $1 million in service revenue a month, my old dealership did $1 million a year.
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