STORY PAGE
The Suggestion
Being a “Job Shopper” was great. You managed to travel. The Job Shop paid your travel expenses. If you did not like your job, you could easily find a new one. You made more money than those around you doing the same job. You were also given per diem to pay for living expenses.
It was a great life for a single person. Jobs were plentiful and people were begging you to work for them. I was only really dissatisfied once. It wasn’t the job shop but the Company.
The “Job Shop” had hired me to work on a brand new building of a Fortune 500 Company. The building was a strangely designed building, with the inspection floor at the bottom. The service floor was in the middle. The heavy equipment floor was on top. The top floor carried at least a five hundred pound per sq ft floor load capacity, after the appropriate safety factor. Part of my job was designing the grillage that would still be needed to spread the load of the weight intensive equipment to be placed there. I also helped with other odds and ends items from sound enclosures, to building facilities, to clean rooms.
After the design contract ran out I was asked to stay and help with the planning of a PM (preventative maintenance) System for the Equipment.
Once the Building was up and running they had so many orders, three shifts could not keep up. I thought of a way to increase their production significantly. One of the workers said I should put in a suggestion. I asked my company contact (boss) how I could go about that. He said I would have to go through the Job Shop office. I approached the local Job Shop office manager.
He asked me what the suggestion was. I told him that I was not ready to give that information. I needed to know what the financial arrangements would be. He explained that a suggestion submitted by them would net the same as one submitted by a Company employee.
Now I cannot remember exactly, but it went something like this. The suggestion submitter would receive an amount equal to 10 % of the estimated profits over a specific period of time, minus the cost of implementing said suggestion. The Job Shop said if they submitted the suggestion, they would give me 10 % of their10%. I decided to just tell my company contact boss what my idea was and let him submit the suggestion. I would give it away before I would let the Job Shop get that large of a cut of my idea.
I went to him. I told him my suggestion. He explained that in his position, he was not eligible to submit the suggestion. He further said it was so simple that the original designers would have thought of that first, so it was probably a waste of effort.
He then said. “If you still wish to go ahead, why do you not get a Company employee to submit it and split the award?”
These Company employees are (or at one time were) a loyal as they come. In those days they remembered the old Company President who, during the depression, made product without buyers, just to keep his employees working. It was said that once in the Company, you would have to commit a murder to get fired. I couldn’t find one employee (including my dad) to submit that suggestion. It was against the rules.
I went back to my Company boss. He said, “You are going about it the wrong way. Go to an Electrical Engineer and tell him you have the mechanical figured out. Ask him to help with the electrical. I finally found a Mechanical Engineer that would do the mechanical to my “electrical” idea. He submitted the suggestion for us.
Within a few weeks I was on to another job in another city for another job shop. About a year later, I was home for a visit. I had forgotten about the suggestion. During a conversation with my dad, he asked, “How much did your share of the suggestion come to?” I told him that I wasn’t aware that it had been approved.
It wasn’t approved, but my idea was installed and running. They were producing so much product that what they couldn’t possibly accomplish in three shifts before, they were easily doing in less than two. I should have some real money coming. Time to get in touch with the Mechanical Engineer.
I went to his home. His wife answered the door. She remembered me. I asked where her husband was. She informed me that he was working for another company now and he had gone on ahead. She would be following as soon as he found a decent place to live. I didn’t quite believe her and said so. She then told me the company had fired him for using the WATTS line to make calls to promote sponsors for his after hours racing.
I told her no one had ever been fired for using the WATTS line. Everyone there did it. That Monday I would do a little checking and be back. (I had friends who would know.
He was fired. It was said because he used the WATTS line. Also, when an employee wins a suggestion award, it appeared in the company newsletter. There was no announcement.
I was indirectly responsible for him loosing his job.
Neither of us received any money.
Once again, life goes on.
When T.J. Watson was IBM and many years after, this company was probably the best in the US. Later, during the period mentioned above the company was mostly living on its laurels, and it's lawyers capability to put off the charges of it being a Monopoly. Today, most of the buildings I worked in, are owned by other companies, or preparing for demolition. Big Blue is now just a faded blue.
 | |
|