If you’d like to work up an appetite for the Green Aberdeen potluck, put on your necktie and go to 3M Aberdeen’s job fair on Tuesday, October 3. Janet Hedges of 3M HR, sends this flyer:
Paid parental leave, and you get to make respirators, furnace filters, and good American tape… nice symbols of how we Americans should be really good at filtering out noxious fuming and sticking together.
I worked at a 3M plant in Northridge, CA as a temp for about a year. Back in ’92 – up until the Northridge Earthquake shut it down for 6 months. Regular production employees there got a similar package – but at that time were already making $28.17/hour. In addition to what is listed here, they got quarterly profit-sharing checks (quite substantial too), and the shifts were 12-hours, 3 days on and three days off, followed by 2 days on and 2 days off. With overtime set at over 8 hrs., plus over 40 hours, essentially, no one worked at regular pay for more to 28 hours per week. Everything else was 1.5X, until one hit 60 total hours, at which point it went to 2X ($56.34/hour). If one picked up an extra shift to give someone else an extra day off,(which was allowed) and got to 80 hours – it went to 3X ($84.51/hour). Most production-level employees were making near 6 figures (including annual stock bonuses (100 shares for Christmas) and profit-sharing). Heck, even as a temp making half that much it was ok.
$28.17 an hour 25 years ago?! That’s a remarkable difference. If that wage kept up with inflation, it would be around $48/hour today.
3M is one of the most guilty companies in sending jobs overseas and hiding overseas income from USA taxation. The wages Mr. Schriever quoted were union wages.
http://www.3m.com/3M/en_WW/careers-select-location/
Then surely those 3M wages will skyrocket and jobs will come flooding back to Aberdeen, Brookings, and other 3M towns once we pass the Trump tax plan…
…oh, except Trump will throttle immigration, leaving 3M Aberdeen, Brookings, and other points rural without enough workers to fill 3M’s positions.
3M closing union plants and sending jobs to half-paid workers in South Dakota is no better than sending jobs to Nigeria. The only real union in SoDak (teachers) is under attack by Trump administrators, already.