Your thoughts
@Quirel? I know you are a farmer.
Close.
I've worked as a farmhand for a few years, but I've also built machinery on an assembly line, and now I'm back in industrial maintenance. IOW, I have all kinds of opinions on this, most of which can be summed up as...
First of all, I'd like to correct what
@f1onagher said above. John Deere is not like Apple. John Deere is
oh so much worse than Apple. If your phone bricks, you get a new one. If your tractor bricks, you are losing thousands of dollars every day while it sits in the field, waiting for a John Deere-certified field technician to come and unbrick it. Farmers can't fix the machine themselves, they can't hire a local guy to do fix it, and they can't buy third-party parts to upgrade the tractors. John Deere wants to control what you can do with the machine that they sold to you, and they're going to use that control to suck every dollar they can out of you.
In other words, John Deere looks at the relationship that McDonalds has with their ice cream machine vendor, and they want that exact relationship with the farmers of America.
So yeah. I'm feeling so many levels of schadenfroh right now.
Second, we have the fact that temp workers were hired to replace the union workers. This isn't as uncommon as you might think. At the factory I used to work at, all new assembly line workers were hired through a temp agency. If the company liked them and if the supervisor felt like doing her job (AKA: When Mars and Venus were properly aligned in the sky) those temps would be hired on as full employees.
This system was pretty abusive, but I understand the incentives involved. Twenty, maybe thirty years ago, applying for a blue collar job like warehouse work meant walking into the warehouse, introducing yourself to the shop supervisor, and asking if he had a job open. If he liked your performance on the job, you stayed on. Otherwise, you got fired after a few weeks and you went looking for a new job somewhere else.
Nowadays, it all goes through HR. Which means that the advertisement, application, job interview, and firing is handled by a bunch of college grads who've never worked on the floor, never set foot on the floor unless they have to, and in fact do not have a clue what is going on out there. This is an untenable way of doing business, and we should look at doing whatever we can to bring the old ways back. This will probably involve fewer job benefits and liabilities, so that hiring a new employee won't be such a risk. On the plus side, this will mean more cash in the employee's paycheck. And most of the fine, updstanding people in HR can go back to doing more useful work, like picking trash out of the parking lot.
Wait, shit, where was I?
OK, so temp employees. Yeah, if they're new to the job, they don't know shit. I'm not too worried about them injuring themselves, because it's not like we purposefully design our factories to cull the weaklings from the herd. At least, not to more we don't. In order, I'd say that the three injuries most likely to occur in a modern tractor factory are:
- Flat feet from standing in the same place too long.
- Hit by a forklift.
- Something dropped on ya.
And of course, temp workers are new to the job, so they're more likely to injure themselves. But they're far more likely to do their job wrong, and there's probably not a lot of employees remaining to teach them to assemble a tractor right. So there's going to be more tractors that need additional fit or finishing... or tractors that get clear into the field before the farmer realizes that the wheels on the tractor weren't bolted on all the way.
In some ways I'm kind of impressed, because...I will freely cop to having driven tractors single-digit number of times in my life, but I was under the impression John Deere--and modern ones in particular--had become substantially more driver-friendly than previous ones had been and that was part of the company's schticks alongside their famous/infamous maintanence scheduling and incentives stuff where they were trying to win market-share.
So, like...Either the office-workers are even more insulated and incapable dummies than I am (which is humorous to consider), or their intuitive, simple driving systems aren't as simple...Or, I suppose for the no fun, there's always 'accidents happen', but that's no fun...
Sadly, the answer here is "Accidents happen." It's no fun, but it's honest.
Y'see, modern tractors are very easy to drive... in a straight line, in an empty field. They have GPS, and some of them might also have that fancy schmancy camera view technology, like a backup screen on some of those modern cars that shows what's behind you and a fair estimate of the path that the car will take. I dunno. Haven't really kept up to date with tractors.
I drove the 7R, which is the slightly smaller cousin of the 8R that was involved in the accident. It's hard to see the ground ahead of that tractor because the hood and the front tires take up so much of your forward vision. It's not hard to believe that someone new to driving those tractors couldn't judge the distance between the weights and the pole and crashed. Happens all the time to new farmhands.
Honestly, from the report, the damage wasn't too bad. The paint was scuffed off of the weights, which are just jerrycan-shaped chunks of pig iron. And an electrical box was smashed, but it was one of those little 120v outlets. Wasn't even important enough to protect with a bollard. Call me when someone crashes into a 480v electrical panel.
I can't even bring myself to make fun of him for being a salaried employee sent out to do a man's job. This is no fun at all!
