Encino Motorcars, LLC v. Navarro (16-1362)

General Discussion
41

That’s the same argument that’s used against the idea of wage increases in any industry. We can’t give restaurant workers a wage hike because no one wants to pay 50 cents extra for a burger.

Well, yes, I do want to spend 50 cents extra for a burger, because that 50 cents extra will make the guy at the restaurant more wealthy, which means he will go out and spend more money, which will make the places he spends it at more wealthy, and they will go and hire more people to meet the increased demand from all the people who are spending more money, and that will tighten the labor supply market, which will drive wages up and I will end up making more money.

The race-to-the-bottom mentality that we adopted shortly before Reagan took office, for everyone but the already wealthy, is the surest way to end up with only a few big winners, and the rest of us will lose out.

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42

which you will promptly spend to cover the increased cost of stuff you’re buying.

There’s no free lunch. Trickle down/up hasn’t really panned out. It’s more like a pyramid scheme but the folks at the top end up with the money regardless of the starting direction. At some point, you don’t really spend more if more comes in. People who get to the top are usually hoarders at heart. You have a billion dollars and spend $100M/yr. If you make it to $2B, you likely don’t need/want to double your spend. You keep it to impress your friends and frighten your enemies…

43

I’m certainly not advocating voodoo economics, if that’s the impression I gave.

44

You make it sound quite simple, just fire slow workers so that production increases. It can take months to find a suitable replacement technician, it is not easy to replace those who are below average in production.

45

The people at the bottom end up being able to buy more stuff, their wages rise more than the prices for what they buy. There’s lots of expensive stuff they can’t afford, or nearly as much as, that inflates less.

Trickle up has worked, for food stamps, Medicaid, Medicare, minimum wage…

Ted Turner said you really only need the first billion, after that you’re just keeping score.

If employers paid enough they’d have no problem.

46

You seem to be determined to make everything simple

The world isn’t a simple place, even if you’d like it to be

Yeah, I’ve been in the same situation at the dealer. They called it “non-time”

All the years I worked there, I NEVER got paid for that “non-time” . . . I got a raw deal every single time

At some point, I asked the shop foreman “Why do you go through the motions? We both know I’ve never gotten paid non-time, and never will.” I walked away before he could answer my question.

Even so, I don’t regret working there. I learned a lot, both mechanical and social skills. What to do, and also what not to do. I learned that with some guys, you should pay attention and learn as much as possible, whereas with others, whatever they did, you should do the exact opposite :smirk_cat:

47

At the new car dealer level, even the dealer has no say-so over what is paid for warranty repairs. The manufacturer says X hours. Don’t like it. Suck it.

One problem I’ve seen is this and more than once. To keep the mechanics busy a dealer needs to be running 1 to 2 weeks behind on scheduling service work. This assures that the techs stay busy.

Unfortunately, most of these dillweds think there’s a problem when they have to tell a customer their appt. is Wednesday of the following week. This leads to the notion that the techs can’t keep up so they start hiring additional help.
Very quickly the scheduled work load for the next few weeks is caught up and then EVERYBODY is standing around idle with the short temper fuse getting shorter.

Not getting paid for warranty repairs is the reason I said enough is enough and walked away from new car dealer jobs. Never again.
One day I repaired 4 cars (Subarus of course…) with all of the repairs under warranty and did not get paid one red cent. On top of that I was told I had a comeback.

The “comeback” involved a Subaru owner who had 100k miles on his beater which had never seen a car wash since the day it was new. He had come in originally with a "Front end noise " complaint. His car had 3 problems. Tie rods, both inner CV joints gone, and both lower ball joints gone. He insisted on fixing ONLY the CV joints as that was the loudest noise. He refused to listen about the critical lower ball joints.
Three months later he came back complaining about “Front end noise” and even in spite of the “CUSTOMER REFUSED REPAIRS” notation on the RO the company backed this jackass.
Last day in Dealerville when they assured me they would pay me for the ball joints and tie rods and did not follow through…

48

Do you all remember you first real job? When I got my first check, I couldn’t believe how much I was being paid., a little less than $5/hour. But $5 hour is lot more than nothing, which was my earnings before. Anybody do what I did, calculate how much you made per minute? I got my calculator blazing, then took a break and figured out how much I made during the break. Hey, enough to buy a snack from the vending machine. Now that’s living! :wink:

49

Geez, it took me a long time to get to $5 an hour. 50 cents, then 85 cents, then $1.65, then $2.40 etc. But I’m older than you are.

50

Last November I spoke to some young technicians while at the training center in California, they were earning $15 per hour and not allowed to work more than 40 hours per week.

The reason they were not allowed to work more than 40 hours was “because of the new labor law” however they could not explain.

If a technician works 50 hours but flags 35 hours normally he would be paid $525. With California’s minimum wage of $11 per hour plus overtime that technician would be paid $605. With the minimum wage this high there is little incentive to work hard when warranty time losses are considered so dealers must limit work hours.

51

You don’t think that if employers paid high-enough wages they’d get all the good workers they want?
The cheapest strategy would be to fund community colleges to train a surplus of auto mechanics.

Great job! I started at $2.

Hmmm… Quoth History of Changes to the Minimum Wage Law | U.S. Department of Labor 'In 1949, the minimum wage was raised from 40 cents an hour to 75 cents an hour for all workers ’ You really are older than I thought! Look good for your age. I notice that my $2 was above minimum.

52

They’re already doing that. They’re also doing it for factory work - they’ve banded together to make a fund that has outfitted the local tech school with an amazing setup of state of the art equipment, but then they offer the graduates $10-12 an hour, which in my area means you’ll have to have a roommate just to afford a bad 1 bedroom apartment.

And then they whine that they’re having such a hard time finding qualified workers. Well, duh. I can make $15 an hour at the Burger King. Why would I waste time and money going to school to learn how to work for you when I can make 3 bucks more an hour with no education and no skills?

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53

I absolutely agree with @shadowfax on the dilemma of many new mechanics in the industry

They are LIED to by many recruiters for fancy name technical institutes. They are told they’ll be making upwards of $100K/year when they enter the field. They’re not being told it’s POSSIBLE to earn this after several years, if you’re smart and efficient and manage to hire on with a good employer. No. They’re told they WILL earn this when they start at dealerships. They’re told they’ll be the elite, the cream of the crop, better than the crusty old mechanics who are currently in the field.

Then they show up at the dealership.

And they learn a few hard lessons.

They are not the cream of the crop, they’re just young guys who need to learn a lot

Those crusty old guys are not so crusty, and they’re not so slow and dumb. In fact, they can outwork and outdiagnose the young guys in many instances

They’ll have to spend thousands of dollars on tools immediately, just to get going

They’ll have to spend lots of money each year, accumulating new tools, just to have what they need to continue in the field

They’ll have to figure out how to do all this, while at the same time paying off BIG bucks for the schooling

I saw MASSIVE turnover, once these young guys learned the truth.

If people wouldn’t lie to get bodies in the classroom . . . and a commission for each body . . . then they might just get guys that understand the situation, difficulties, costs involved, etc., and they STILL want to give it a go

Sure, in theory your idea sounds okay

But in reality it didn’t work out very well, not in my opinion.

What I just described were common scenarios

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54

I consider it a serious conflict of interest when someone like UTI feeds the corporate line to the naive students and one of the major stockholders of UTI is Roger Penske who owns countless dealerships.

It seems to me that he’s breeding cannon fodder so to speak…

Those 10 guys aren’t working out? No problem; another class is graduating…

One weekend I tuned in at the end of a UTI infomercial. The last minute of the show revealed a huge bulletin board with job opportunities. The biggest ad there was a small billboard from a dealer in the OK City area.
It promised the moon and stars of course. I used to work at that dealer and none of what was stated will ever, ever happen.

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55

Many low wage workers used to be not covered by minimum wage laws. Small employers, restaurants, farm workers and many others were exempt. Even more workers are working now without minimum wage, unemployment insurance, workers comp or disability benefits due to the often illegal ploy of calling them independent contractors.

By the way, my second job paid $0.65 an hour. I don’t know what I made on my first job because I never saw any of the money. My grandmother hired me out for the summer to a neighbor who had a stake body logging truck with a cut bank operation. My job was to help the driver Peavey the logs onto the bed stacking them like a pyramid until the top row only had one log. I was 12 years old, 6’ tall, 180 lb.

56

The thing that bothered me about my 50 cent an hour job at the greenhouse was I never got paid regularly. After a while I’d go in and ask for some money and he’d have to see if he had enough to pay me some. He was the mayor too but a good flower grower but not a good businessman. I don’t think I was ever qualified for the minimum wage laws as a part time, student, temporary, etc.

Now my 85 cent an hour job at the restaurant was all together different. Regular pay, closed after Christmas for two months, nice people, and of course its where everyone that was anyone worked. I must have dated at least five girls that worked there. When you are young and in love you tried to get the same shift and your heart goes pitter pater while frying hamburgers.

Yeah I drove there after I got my license. Told the story before but we used to cater the country club once a week and the boss needed someone to deliver chicken to them so he asked me if I could drive. I said sure because I could. After a couple weeks of doing this he asked me if I could drive and said sure again, then he said you have a license don’t you, and being an honest guy I said no. Hee hee. He wouldn’t let me drive after that. I was so careful though, nothing was going to happen and it was only a half mile away. Thing is though the judge was at the country club gathering and he knew I didn’t have a license (another story) so I had to be careful he never saw me drive.

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57

As a non-pro who buys tools, it’s amazing how many Snap-On tool chests full of barely-used tools show up on Craigslist for a fraction of their new cost about 1-2 months after the school year ends.

58

That’s been going on for a while. Before Craigslist came along there used to be a newstand “For Sale” paper sold around here. It was like Craigslist with ink on paper.

Under the “Tools and Machinery” category there was always a couple of ads each week for a chest full of Snap-On tools on the cheap. No doubt the owners are still paying for them today… :wink:
.

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59

If they’re offering so little, they don’t really need them, do they? Reagan told employees to vote with their feet; employers vote with their checkbooks.

The private places are rip-offs; I wrote ‘community colleges’ and meant it.

BTW, the private for-profit schools make their money off the tax-payers: the borrowers don’t get jobs, can’t pay their loans, government guarantees pay them instead: they can’t lose, no matter how poorly they treat their students.

I had hoped that the Prez would solve the entire problem by giving everyone a degree from Trump U, then we could shut the student loan program down.

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60

The employers DO need the mechanics . . . to answer your question

Who’s going to work on the cars?

the porters?

the service writers?

the service director?