Flag-Rate Jobs are Evil

I’ve been a mechanic for a little over 3 years now. My time at my workplace has been a series of ups and downs. There have been large swaths of good as well as bad. Most importantly I work with great people at my job - that’s the only reason I’ve lasted as long as I have.

I started out as a “Maintenance Tech”. My main duties were to keep the shop clean, products stocked, and to handle little piss-ant tickets such as oil changes, flat repairs, and doing tires. It was an exciting endeavor at first - but it get sour quickly. Doing the same work over and over again became monotonous after about half a year. I made $15 per hour at this position - hardly livable these days. The work was grueling. Terribly hot during the summer, very cold during the winter (we did at least have heaters in the shop). When it rains, you’re gonna get wet. The shop floors had no drains to help with water dripping off of cars after they had been pulled in. One of the car bays turns into a huge puddle every time it rained.

Shitty conditions and shitty pay - but now that’s most jobs in America, right? Not this bad, my friend. Read on. 👀

The real shit started when I became a “C Tech” after about a year and a half of being an MT. Upon becoming a tech in my workplace, you’re placed on flag rate pay…your hours are jacked up to 10/hr a day. Your schedule is placed at random - you never really know what days you will have off until the schedule pops up. It honestly takes a shitty (but reliable) job and makes your pay random each week.

My first half a year or so as a tech was great, honestly. There was a mass exodus of other technicians right around my “promotion” and it was only me and two other techs in a 6 bay shop. Work was plentiful, of good quality, and hours were easy to come by. I regularly made 40-50 hours every week. It was nice. I enjoyed my co-workers and my work. I don’t at all hate working on cars.

But then the shit storm happened - when our store went under the management of a new general manager he came in and started demanding more work for the same flag rates - we were to start shaking down front-ends on every vehicles courtesy check even though the flag rate for a courtesy check was only 0.1/hr (~8 minutes) when the courtesy checks already entailed:

• checking all fluids
  • coolant level
  • brake fluid
  • washer fluid
  • oil level
• Various car components
  • belts
  • engine air filter
  • cabin air filter
  • wiper blades
  • complete light check
    • turn signals
    • running lights
    • brake lights
  • coolant system
• Probably more that I can’t remember. I don’t hardly do them anymore.

But this isn’t even the shittiest part. At this point we still were still doing inspections (courtesy checks) with good ol’ pen and paper. The inspections were quick and easy. Then…then came the tablets 😤

This is where shit hit the fan. Now, no longer were we able to leave sections of inspections blank, or just check them off. Because let’s be honest - you can’t inspect all of those things thoroughly in 8 minutes. Every minute you take longer than 8 minutes, well…that’s time lost. Time you’re there for free. Also with the tablets we were mandated to take at least 5 pictures on each inspection - no matter if there were 5 concerns or not…or maybe we were supposed to find at least 5 concerns? Who knows 🤷 But the tablet cameras were actual garbage, and didn’t have a flash. I had to hold the bulky tablet with one hand, flashlight with another, and use my nose to hit the camera button to take any kind of decent pictures. I often times just chose not to take pictures. I loathed using the tablets - being a software developer I could feeeel how cheap the software was and how haphazardly it was slapped together. Oftentimes the software would crash with SQL database errors and the whole system would go down. It is just awful. A terrible experience. Many bugs 🐛

Then came the next era of bullshit - the CVI mandate. The new GM decided our numbers weren’t good enough, so he mandated a certain percentage of inspections be “complete vehicle inspections”. Such a high percentage, in fact, that the CVI which once was a tool to make sales became just something that we had to flip on our tablets so that we could move on to the next car. We used to use the CVI when a car needed a deeper look - for brake grinding, shaking while driving, strange noises, etc. After the mandate it was just something we had to trudge through to continue our work. Essentially, everything on a car had to be looked at for a CVI - only for 0.5/hr flag rate. You can’t reasonably rack a car, get it in the air, take the tires off, and look at every single component in a half hour. The whole idea behind the 0.5/hr on the CVI is that it has a good chance to turn into work that you can bank off of (meaning you can do the work in less time than you get paid for it) but when you slap a CVI onto every vehicle, it looses it’s effectiveness. We are in a low-income area and most people already didn’t want the courtesy checks. They just wanted their oil changed and to go on about their lives. They can’t afford suspension work and the likes.

Nearly every ticket turned into a time-sink. We are made to work 50/hr weeks at my company. The “default” pay for each week was 30 hours. So if you worked for 50 hours, and only make 28 hours…they would pay you for 30. Not 40…not 35…30. There is potential to work for 20 hours for free every single week at this place.

To make matters even worse for me in particular, I was an up-and-coming mechanic, and at the same time that I received my “promotion” to C-Tech, they completely axed the maintenance tech position. So as soon as I rose up the ranks, I was right at the bottom again. I had no one to handle the little piss-ant tickets that I had been doing as an MT, now I am on flag rate and still doing most of the MT work because I was the newest tech. Oil changes pay 0.3/hr. A full set of tires pays between 0.6/hr - 1.1/hr if they are low-profile (which are harder to do). To make 40 hours I would have to do 133 fucking oil changes. Or 40 - 50 sets of 4 tires. Not feasible.

The whole system is honestly a shit-show. The whole time I’m there all the other technicians are basically competing to get shafted the hardest by the company. I just couldn’t look at the job the same anymore - I felt as though I was being used and abused.

The CVI mandate has only became worse since then. Things hardly ever sell. Hell, I can’t even find it in myself to even recommend things anymore…I know even if I bust ass for the first half of the week there will be a day on the schedule without enough work to do and once that happens the whole week is screwed up and you will be working for free - so I started doing the bare minimum. I feel like an idiot to bust my ass for 50 hours to only make 32 hours…only two more hours than if I did hardly anything all week 🤷

🖕 that company. They should be ashamed using people how they do. The minute you sign yourself up for flag-rate you’re basically signing away your workers rights. I’ve done the math and I’ve pulled in over 5,000 tires off of the tire tuck over the course of 3 years in this place, and never once have I received a penny for doing so. Meanwhile I get chump change to install the things while the company gouges the customer on the tire prices. It’s truly a shameful business and an abhorrent company.

🖕🖕🖕🖕🖕🖕🖕🖕

Love my co-workers though. Buncha good fellas’!