View From The Trenches

The incident last week involving an airline steward’s dramatic exiting an airplane after a confrontation with an unruly passenger caught America’s interest. I think what made this event so newsworthy was the fact that people are curious about how much pressure an overworked and stressed-out American worker can take before saying “hasta la vista baby” to his job. By the way, anyone out there in auto glass land feel that way? 

Steven Slater had his 15 minutes of fame in New York. He seemed to be a mild-mannered employee, but after allegedly being hit by a bag and cursed by a rude passenger, he took to the plane’s intercom, first returned the woman’s invective, then publicly resigned by saying, “I quit!” He then discharged one of the plane’s emergency slides, grabbed two beers from the drink cart and left the plane via slide. 

This became a media “cause celebre” simply because first it happened in the largest media center in the country, it was a slow news day and it happens to depict in a simple fashion how frustrated and stressed out American workers are getting. 

Fortunately we in the auto glass industry don’t fly or work around airplanes, but I would bet there are a large number of us who feel a great deal of stress on a daily basis either from our jobs or just by the economic state in which we find ourselves.

Let’s talk about our job first. How easy is it? We are approaching the end of summer when our work load is usually the highest. Daylight is longer, the temperatures are warmer and people are driving more, making opportunities for replacement and repairs increase.

I haven’t found a person yet who says that being in the auto glass trade is a cushy job. It seems most people acknowledge that we techs have a fairly physical job (some AGR managers excepted). Whether it is installing, driving a distributor’s delivery truck or being a CSR, there is a physical toll that is being taken daily on us. We can feel pain in our hands, back and legs by the time Friday afternoon rolls around, if not four nights sooner.

You can sense a real feeling of impending doom out there by American workers. We are being “leaned out” by attrition and layoffs and are asked to produce more in a shorter amount of time. Companies are placing larger burdens on employees with little financial reward. Many of the self-employed have become desperate and have lowered profit margins to attract business of any ilk, thereby setting a stage for working longer and harder for far less money. Many of us are biting our tongues at these changes because there also is an underlying fear that there is not another job or opportunity out there that we can easily slide into.

Read any business page and you can see that large corporations are making larger profits and stockpiling cash. Many have cut costs by slicing employees and cutting back on benefits to realize such gains. Just look at what some of our largest in our industry have done lately. Older techs get pushed out to be replaced by younger, cheaper, more pliable and possibly more productive (in numbers) employees. Distribution centers are built with an accent on technology and minimizing personnel. As wholesale markets are being abandoned or downsized by some with warehouse closures, longer routes with more stops will become the norm. Is any company more likely to increase workloads for existing employees rather than to hire more help? Ask a call center employee or installation tech if they are working to maximum capacity. It sure seems that way. The nation’s productivity climbed to 3.6 percent last quarter, doubling the normal 1.5 percent, meaning fewer workers produced more goods. By the way, did anyone’s wallet see more green?

Customers have also become more demanding. They “want it now and want it all.” With the business malaise we have experienced, too many companies seem to take the Burger King approach of allowing the customer to “have it their way,” usually at the expense of their employees.

How many “happy” upbeat people are you running into lately? I am seeing far too many people working too hard, too long and with little hope for a short-term recovery. It is sort of like watching society as a whole be placed in a pressure cooker with a lid securely fastened. The question is looming more of when (and not if) we will witness more incidents similar to what happened at JFK last week. Sad to say, while Steven Slater’s actions certainly inconvenienced passengers on that flight by delaying disembarking, at least no physical harm took place. That can’t be said about the increasing number of job site violence incidents that have been taking place throughout the country.

What Steven Slater did was wrong, but I find myself strangely sympathetic with his actions. If you appreciate a certain flair for an exit strategy, he certainly provided one. How many times has any tech wished he could remove a windshield and then leave the jobsite, leaving an annoying customer with an empty hole in his car? How many CSRs wish they could hang up on a caller? Last, but not least, for the sake of my liability carrier, I will not provide fodder for any creative action that someone could perform in telling his/her boss or manager, “Take this job and shove it!”

And, for those who feel self-employment is the bastion of personal freedom, I have never taken more than four days off in a row, always bracketing a weekend or holiday, in more than seven years. A two-week vacation? You have to be joking. We have our own set of trials and tribulations that beset us.

History has shown us that the pendulum will swing back. “Happy Days” will return someday. Hopefully respect for our labors will, too. We are not animals or drones. However, most people as kids loved slides. Wheeee …