Well put. Your comment hit shockingly close to home for me and describes really well exactly what you’ll find in tons of small to mid sized privately owned manufacturing facilities.
Super short story of my experience with this:
Worked at my family’s owned machine shop for years. Toward the end of my time there, unbeknownst to anyone outside of ownership, the company went through a series of LEAN manufacturing and general procedural changes. Hindsight being 20/20 its glaringly obvious they were prepping to sell to an investor group.
One of these changes was the addition of an actual maintenance department (tell tale sign I teach people now is that when places add a “department” and the department is a single dude or dudette they’re fluffing their tinder picks for more sellers to swipe right). So up to this point for the previous idk all the years I was alive up to that point, all maintenance on the Mazacs was done by whoever ran the machine until they couldnt at which point Mazac would be called to send out a rep.
So one day I come in to the machine I spent 1000x’s more time inside than the time spent inside all the females ive been inside of put together was padlocked for lock out tag out. Start times were staggered depending on department and maintence didnt come in for another hour. I read the maintenance report, saw it was a coolant line problem I’ve fixed dozens of times. Went to maintenance cage, grabbed the dude’s key, unlocked the lockout tag out, fixed the problem and had the machine running before maintenance punched in for the day.
Hot damn was that a mistake. Got a big write up, management calls a meeting with me making claims they were doing me a favor by not firing me. The issue wasnt the unauthorized unlocking of rhe machine because I was trained for lock out tag out procedures. The issue was that I unlocked a machine that was lockout tag out’ed by another person.
Whole fucking thing didnt sit well with me. By this time there was no secret if the sale, managment was transitioning, and the whole thing felt like a flex by management to make a show and used me as their public tar and feathering.
So stubborn as mule me reads the whole section of the osha manual for lock out tag out. Pulled the training records. Put everything together and went into the person’s office responsible for the whole shitshow that was the special meeting to demonstrate that I wouldnt get special treatment. Laid out for him how the company failed to follow mandated training schedule, never assigned trained lock out tag out personel with assigned tags, then once they started assigning tags they never assigned tags to the previously trained team members and lastly never provided adequate resources on the policy and procedural changes for employees to reference.
Half way through this very aggressive conversation the dudes office had the newly appointed GM with almost every other member of management from the meeting.
Despite the classic internet meme where everybody stood up and cheered, its honestly the closest i could imagine to having people cheer lol. Noone chimed in most just took it in but there were enough faces with shiteating grins thst in the moment I felt certain I successfully threw what he thought was the perfect opening move for his new promotion right the fuck back in his face.
The most satisfying part wasnt telling him somthing along the lines of, “The cognitive dissonance it takes to schedule a special meeting with attendance from every single department lead and fucking manager there just to fuckin tell me Im not getting special treatment shows how unfit you are at this role.” Naaaa the best part was shortly after the meeting I resigned, then about a year later I’m told, “Have you checked out your old production manager’s new youtube channel?” I respond wtf you talking about, “You didnt know [insert anonymous name] got fired and started his own youtube channel hes calling consulting videos but really its just him talking to a camera the same stupid ideas and methods that got him fired. But you gotta check it out cuz the last video he posted this week his wife walks uo behind him and just start shaking his titty! He even puts into the comment an apology that he couldnt rerecord it because of how great the 45 mins of recording was upto that point!”
To this day my heart melts with joy knowing someone I called dumb was proven by a jury of our peers to be undoubtedly as dumb as I said he was.
Whaaaaaaat. This is the most unexpected news story I think I’ve ever read.