Employee Abuse at Motorola

I have worked for Motorola as a factory worker, through Manpower, and the abuses of employeed that I suffered and witnessed were numerous. As a policy, they treated their temporary employees with a criminal disregard for safety, and I am posting this in the hopes that the abuses that I and many like me have suffered will not be allowed to continue.

While on the factory floor, we were required to wear special straps on our shoes which discharged static buildup so that we did not damage the electrical components that we handled with electrostatic discharge. What they fail to inform their employees is that they have an official policy, which the low level management is eiter unaware of or chooses to ignore, that no employee is to work around powered equipment while wearing these shoe straps. This is because the shoe straps create a short circuit between your feet and the conductive floor, and make the severity of an electrical shock at least three time what it would be without the straps, and the difference could be life or death. Wearing the straps is equivalent to working around electrical equipment while standing barefoot in a puddle of water. There was not a day that went by, however, where I was not required to work around powered equipment. There were several days when I even was required to connect 100 amp power supplies to equipment while wearing the ground straps. To give the reader an idea as to the scale of these supplies, a typical electric chair generates 6-20 amps. None of the employees I worked with understood that the straps were dangerous. Most even thought that the straps actually protected them from being electrocuted. I brought this up numerous times with two supervisors at Motorola, and with Manpower. Each time, they told me they would look into it, and then of course they put me right back to work with the straps.

The majority of all workers at Motorola are temps, like I was. They are not actually temporary employees, many have actually been working in the Motorola factory for years, and even decades in a few cases. What makes them temps, or "contractors," to use Motospeak, is that they are not officially employed by Motorola, but rather by staffing agencies such as Manpower. They do this so that they do not have to give their employees health benefits or vacations. The prominence of "contractors" of course decreases the further you travel up the corporate chain, along with the frequency of abuse. I had several different "contractor" positions, both as a factory worker and as a filing clerk, and from my experience, virtually all of the factory workers and at least half of the clerical workers were "contractors." Each "contractor" was hired for a term of exactly three months, coincidentally the precise amount of time an employee at Manpower can work uninterrupted without being entitled to health benefits. Every three months, Motorola would close for a week for "inventory," at which time all of the workers contracts had expired. After that week, all of the employees' contracts would be renewed, and they would be back to work, and not entitled to benefits. I have asthma, so it is not only impossible for me to get private health insurance, but it is also dangerous for me to go without my prescription inhaler, which I was forced to do while working at Motorola.

There are also many other comparatively minor abuses. For example, I was told that I would be fired if I did not work seven days per week. I quit after I was threatened by a fellow employee. I of course told Manpower about this incident before I quit, and about the hostile work environment, and from then on, they just no longer had anyassignments for me.

The use of "contractors" has increased dramatically in recent years, despite job cuts in virtually all other industries. According to their website, Manpower currently employs 2.5 million workers. The staffing agencies claim to be creating jobs, but in reality, more and more full time employees are being replaced by permanent temps. I know that my experience was not an isolated incident.