Automate America

https://automateamerica.com/app/automation_work/index/3974

$3,392 a week.

Two machine tool builders, Holland, Michigan. Starts Aug 24, two to three weeks, day shift.

Fixtures per prints. Cylinders, clamps, nests. Plug-and-play cable and hose. Pre-terminated runs — tool build, not controls work.

$64/hr straight time, $83.20 overtime, ten-hour days.

Tell me the rate that would actually make you drive to Michigan for three weeks.

https://automateamerica.com/app/automation_work/index/3974

Two machine tool builders. Holland, MI. Starts Aug 24, 2–3 weeks.

Fixtures per prints, cylinders, clamps, nests, plug-and-play cable and hose.

10 hrs × 5 days. $64 ST / $83.20 OT = $3,392 a week.

Overtime is in the schedule, not a maybe. Prove me wrong that this beats a salaried tool room.

👉 https://automateamerica.com/app/automation_work_new/add

A bad hire isn't just bad for the company and bad for the person. It's bad for the people you already have.

Robert Half: 57% of hiring managers say a bad hire contributed to OTHER employees leaving. Around 95% say it hit team morale.

Your best people absorb the slack. They work the extra hours. Some of them start looking.

The US Department of Labor puts the direct cost at 30% of that person's first-year earnings — and that's before you count what it did to your retention.

Increase the odds by not committing on day one.

👉 https://automateamerica.com/app/automation_work/search?work_type=Hourly%20Contract

Nobody should go independent straight out of school. I want to say that first, because the rest of
this only makes sense if you take it seriously.

Out of college or tech school you need a company that will train you, put you next to people better
than you, and let you make mistakes on their time. That is the most valuable thing an employer ever
gives you and you cannot buy it. Take it. Use it.

But once you have your 10,000 hours — and some people get there in six years, not twenty, because
they chased the hard jobs and the 2am faults — you are at a decision most people never actually
make. They just keep going.

Staying is a legitimate choice. It just should be a choice.

So here is the question I want argued with: after the hours are earned, is the next twenty years in
one plant the best thing for a career, or the most comfortable thing?

👉 https://automateamerica.com/app/automation_work_new/add

Here is the part nobody says out loud about reshoring: we are opening lines faster than any region can staff them permanently.

A new line needs a robot specialist, a machine vision engineer, a servo drives expert and a controls engineer who has seen a high-voltage test cell. It needs each of them badly, for a few weeks. And
then not again until the next launch.

You cannot hire four specialists for every line, in every town, and stay profitable. So the question was never how to own that capability. It is how to reach it.

Should a plant own its specialists, or reach them? I have planted my flag. Tell me I am wrong.

A contract advertising a higher hourly rate can pay you less. Here is the arithmetic people skip.

Ten hours a day, six days a week is a sixty-hour week. Forty at straight time, twenty at overtime —
every week, not an occasional Saturday. On a contract paying $72.00 straight and $93.60 on overtime,
the premium on those twenty hours is worth about $432 a week on its own.

Now put that next to a posting offering a bigger headline number on an eight-hour, five-day week.
Forty hours, no premium at all. The number on the poster is larger and the week is worth less.

I have been on both sides of this. I was the independent who took the impressive-looking rate and
worked out afterwards that the schedule underneath it was the whole deal. And I have been the one
writing the posting, where it is genuinely easier to lead with the hourly number than to explain the
week.

The second thing people under-count is the expense package. On this one it is $68 a day per diem
with no receipts, $130 a day toward the hotel, $800 of airfare, a rental car and fuel. Per diem and
hotel together are $198 a day before an hour is worked. Over a fortnight that is not a rounding
error, and it is very often larger than the gap between two competing hourly rates.

So we publish all of it — straight time, overtime, Sunday, travel time, every expense line, the
shift, the hours per day and the days per week — on the posting itself, before anyone applies,
without an account. A free, fair and open marketplace: free to post, free to apply, free to hire.

Tell me where I am wrong. Should a posting be required to state the weekly hours as plainly and as
prominently as it states the hourly rate?

I think a rate without a schedule is half a number. I would rather hear the case against that than
not.

👉 https://automateamerica.com/app/automation_work/index/3969

Moving tooling to the part to perform high-voltage testing.

That one line tells you what the fortnight is. Not teaching points from scratch — cleaning up
program issues someone else left, and working a hit list on a new system. Material handling, pick
and place, and getting the test tooling onto the pack accurately enough that the reading means
something.

KUKA robots, EV battery manufacturing and testing, Woodruff, South Carolina. $72.00/hr, $93.60 OT,
$115.20 Sundays. Ten-hour days, six-day weeks, expenses covered.

Every one of those terms is published on the posting before you apply, without an account. That is
deliberate: a free, fair and open marketplace, free to post, free to apply, free to hire.

Question for the programmers: is inheriting somebody else's program harder than starting clean? Say
what you actually think, not what sounds generous.