Only slam is to the poor quality of products that are made
Posted via Topify on Android
I can agree and disagree.
Being a former dealership tech I can tell you a lot of warranty work I did was because of line workers. Loose bolts, pinched wires, bad welds, and the list goes on and on. Here I was, making half the money per hour having to redo the work of someone on the line, guaranteed a job, with more bennies than God, having to correct his mistakes based on warranty time (which is almost always half the book time for flat rate).
I started at GM right out of school in the early '90's and was astounded by the return rate for new cars bought because of something stupid like a rattle next the driver's head (loose bolts in the B pillar), bad bonds on doorskins (Camaros), stripped seat belt bolts (A-bodies of the years). As my career progressed and I went on to work on Fords I was able to sit back and quietly watch the quality come up. There were errors, but not a whole line of errors waiting to be corrected. Warranty work was falling off, but still there, but not in mechanical work, mainly in things like issued recalls for re-flashes.
Then I entered the manufacturing work force. A local plant re-opened and was building rail cars. Right now they have two contracts going on: Houston Metro Rail (the line I was working on) and Amtrak, building three styles of push/pull cars. This plant is a subsidiary of a Spanish company.
To a man, each of us American workers took pride in our work, seeking the utmost quality.
To a man, each of us were waiting for the Spaniards to go home. The Spaniards took no pride in their work, no pride in quality, no pride in saying "they built this." Each American worker did.
I watched the Spaniards break things - sometimes on purpose - and then lie about breaking it, blaming the breakage on bad parts. I watched the Spaniards modify things without any thought to what might happen later on down the line. I watched them ream 8x1.25 bolts into 8x1.0 holes and shrug their shoulders.
We American workers? If we ran into problems like that, we sought to get it fixed. Why were we supplied with 8X1.25 bolts when the holes in the brackets were tapped for 8x1.0? If we broke something... on a rare occasion... we're only human, we stood up and admitted we broke it and then fixed it. We were - are - perfectionists. The man putting the cabs together on the trains identified problems and worked with engineering to get it fixed. Hell, it got to the point where the engineers were coming to him for way to fix the issues (as it should be) whereas when the Spaniard working in the cabs would go in and when he was done it looked like someone took a hammer to all the fiberglass. Issues? What issues?
Make it fit!
No... I'll personally disagree with you on your statement. American pride is making a huge comeback. I've witnessed it, been a part of it, and held my head high at the end of the shift, knowing "I built that."