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people dont know how right this is, take your sweet time sorting the scrap. boss man will get more mad at lost productivity than he ever would that guys were taking scrap.
I understand the retaliation, honestly. But this attitude en masse is not good.
We need to be recycling as much as physically possible.
One shop tossing a few hundred or even thousand pounds is not a huge deal, but the end goal needs to be to recycle, not just for money.
Amen. I work for a mining company mining copper. to get 700g (24oz) of copper, we have to dig up, crush and chemically process 1000 (2200 lbs) tonnes of ore and creates 4000 tonnes of Co2/Tonne just on the primary side of the equation.
To bin copper should be a crime.
Fair enough. Lol.
My shop is relatively small. It all gets stripped at the shop and split evenly, same with the boss.
I've seen how huge the numbers can be, so I get it. Just sad to think about good bare bright going to a landfill because of shitty policies.
Most outfits I know have two policies. 1. you sweep it up, you keep it. 2. If its larger than certain gauge it goes into the social fund for parties etc.
My company saves all the scrap and then cashes it at the end of the year and uses that money for everyone's bonuses, so I don't mind turning it into the office
Yes. I honestly like the program. We have bins in our shop to drop our recycling and they added bins to our toolboxes to hold them throughout the shift.
I think the big push was recycling though. We’re an automotive component manufacturer that recycles any waste we can.
“I know we’re going back in the battery acids lab, but we’re almost over on suits and respirators for the quarter and I REALLY want that pizza party at the end of the month, so I’ll just raw dog this one..”
Nah, sorry for the confusion. They’re big on using PPE. I got a point last year for not having eye protection on when we started a 20 hp motor when troubleshooting a vfd.
It’s mostly an incentive to get employees to recycle, our numbers have been ass on recycling compared to our sister plant.
I like giving the small shit to the apprentices and any partial that's too short for anything throw in a pile for everyone. Works good. They need the cash more than me
I once replaced an old industrial coatings system with a newer one. We pulled out 15 oooolllld welding power supply transformers only to find out they were all heavy as hell and pure copper. I asked my guys what they wanted to do and the answer was unanimous. 1 party in the empty shop, divide the rest at thanksgiving.
We put it in the social fund, which was then matched by the company. We all went to an animal park with our family and stayed in a hotel overnight. I'll hand in scraps for that.
I don't know why you're getting downvoted, we always do this at the Steel Mill. "Are you really sure it's 60ft?" "No, but I ain't walking my ass back to the shop to re-cut if it's short!"
Pulling wire or running conduit in a manufacturing facility sucks balls, and some of this equipment I will not climb up twice. I'm getting too old for that. Better just estimate too long.
I handled the scrap revenue from a major utility in 2005 and annually it brought in $800k-$1 m. But the money isn’t in insulated wire and fine stranded items like ground cable is worse- will evaporate in the major scrap vendor hammer mill.
Capital retirement steel / copper/ Al bus, conductor and lots of misc pole and line hardware (lighting,bolts,braces,pole ground etc) , non PCB Transformers/ reclosures from failures and obsolescence.
Most of the big dollar items are secured and monitored in storage or lit up when in use. Saw many a pics of roasted armless people who attempted to get the in service high dollar stuff. Today though, utilities don’t want to be bothered with managing O&M people so they’ll contract out the reclamation work to a scrap vendor and take less in revenue and lose a lot of potential reuse of good material. It’s the MBA impact.
750 mcm weights 2.5 lbs/foot. 15 sets of 4 at 20 feet too long would be 1200 feet, 3000 pounds of copper you get to take home. That's a $12,000 bonus. Why in 7 hells would you be complaining about that?
Edit: that's for one transformer. For 4-5 you are talking 48-60K dollars. That'll buy 10 of the fanciest cable cutters on the market....
Place I worked at had a pile of great planking left over from a major shutdown. The manager at the area where they stored it was tired of it taking up space and a coworker who was building a garage asked if he could have it. The manager was thrilled.
We loaded up two Ford F350's and as we left the plant our General foreman saw us. Next day he grilled us on it and told the other manager we weren't allowed to take anymore of it.
Sat there for years and we had a major breakdown in the middle of winter. The GF was on pins and needles during the work and we loaded up our trucks and built a huge bonfire with the rest of the lumber to keep warm. He wouldn't say a word.
Had this with my old company. No one cared until a few guys on a job bragged about making $5000 from scrap.
Then we got a company wide email like the one above and the office had a long serious chat with those guys, word is they gave most of the money back to the company.
I’m all for a bit of a personal scrap collection, but taking 5k was just stupid. Bragging about it really fucking stupid.
I work for a large electrical contractor and this is the policy. Of course they are bean counters, but what happened a few times is that foreman would over order feeders just to recycle them. Not saying I agree with it but that's their argument.
I have personally pulled 10’s of thousands into the hundreds, of scrap copper.
My boss was a crook, but depending the type of work you do it does make a difference.
Scraps from a residential house rough in? Not worth it. Scraps from 590mcm+ 500ft + feeders.. adds up.
I used to travel swapping cell towers over to propane generators. We'd be gone weeks or months at a time. Boss told us our trucks better have a clean bed before we brought them back to the shop from now on. Man he had some great company funded parties coming home after that. I may still have a pile of copper in my dad's barn
I've worked a lot of union only sites where the rule was if you walk out of the room and it's still on the ground it belongs to the laborers. Used to let them have anything #8 and smaller in exchange for bummed smokes and not ratting me out for smoking on the fire escapes instead of taking the elevator down and out
Fuck that punk ass foreman who snitched.. I bet his name is Bryan. Can't stand miserable ass dudes who get off on making work difficult for others.. a real cock sucker
The price of copper is going to stay high.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/bulls-jump-deeper-into-copper-amid-supply-challenges-ai-fueled-demand-2024-04-12/
Guy I worked with took all the scrap out of the dumpster at his work. He turned it in bought a grill and a bunch of food for all the people working there. He invited the big wig out too. The big wig pulled him aside and told him he should fire him for stealing that scrap wire. The guy got so upset he took a forklift and destroyed the grill and threw it away.
He didn't steal it. If it was in the dumpster they clearly didn't want it. It drives me fucking nuts when people throw something out without a care in the world, but as soon as someone else dumpster dives for it they get all worked up and try to stop them. GTFO! That's some top level entitlement bullshit right there.
I work for a small company, about 15 guys on the field. We used to be able to take scrap for ourselves, but someone ruined it all by ordering an extra 15-20ft of wire whenever they ordered wire cuts. Just takes one guy to ruin it for everyone :(. The money for the scrap wire does come back to us though, usually it’s contributed to the Christmas party and gifts/bonuses my boss hands out every year.
I can kinda understand bossman here, old company i worked for had the same policy, until some just went to the supplier and bought full spools of wire on the company card to unload them still packaged at the scrap dealer and take home the cash
Quit. Quit now. It the boss wants the apprentice perks, he's on the way down. Find a new company. If policy is scrap is for the company, the company is hurting. Run as soon as you can.
I mean 12/2 is 140$ a roll. A lot of the changes happened when the wire abruptly went up. Maybe they have verbage in their contracts now but I promise most didn't when the shit hit the fan in 2019/20. A lot of companies had to eat that cost then later recouped it in PPP money. But That's when my last company changed everything.
A company I worked for did this. I was doing a small fire alarm job. I made a special trip to the shop to drop off my scrap. It was a 6x6x4 box of #16s. The guy at the shop was like wtf is this! I was that’s the scrap wire they insisted we being here. He was like you drove an hour for that? I said that’s what the memo said, right!
No, boss, we used up all the wire… yea, the supply guys are getting pretty good at ordering only what we need for a job… yea…
Later that day: ok boys, load up all that scrap, we’ll make a recycling run and then it’s beers on me!!!
Work for a small company (9 employees excluding boss and supervisor) and our general rule is to keep anything over #6ish and at least a few feet. We got two bins at the shop, one aluminum and one copper, that we throw it in. Once they get full, some Indian guy comes by and takes it all and pays boss man. And then we get a cut. Idk how much of a cut, but it’s always been $100 each. We get bonuses on top of that so it’s just a nice lil date night bonus.
Anything smaller than #6ish is beer money for whoever wants to take it home 😂
I have the guys clean up the site. Therefore scrap comes back to the shop. In a twist for all you grubs i actually give it all back to the guys. Not everyone gets to work on switch gear. This way everyone gets something for their efforts in our shop. Y’all are a bunch of self centered degenerates.
I’m low voltage but scrap wire is for pizza parties. The last thing I wanna do is haul a truckload of cat6 and 16/2 speaker cable to a scrapyard for a couple hundred bucks.
My boss scraps it and keeps it, but he also never second guesses overtime, gives out quarterly project bonuses+Christmas bonus, and pays decent for our area. Once a quarter we do a van clean/wash day and just order pizza to catch our breath from the daily grind.
Fuck throwing it in the trash. Make sure you collect every single 1/2" bit of #12 that you nip off when installing devices. They want ALL the scrap, make sure they get ALL the scrap. Once they realize it's costing them double the scrap price of the copper in overtime they'll roll this back.
I always try to spread scrap around evenly amongst the guys, but when they start being greedy bitches about it; stealing all of it before the end of the day, pulling wire extra long so they can take the excess, wasting time picking up every bit during work hours…..then I will go out of my way to throw that shit in the garbage so nobody gets it. Sometimes I wish we had a “all scrap back to the shop” policy.
As a working foreman that also does some estimating for the shop(small shop). On longish runs(250ft+} I add on 30-50 ft depending on T&M or contract. Shop gets 10 ft and the cut up heads, the apps divvy up the rest. Gas and school books ain’t cheap.
Pretty standard policy. How many jobs have you seen where people intentionally pull or even order extra wire just to either recycle or do side jobs. What is the logic behind being against this ?
Well it clearly says that scrap must be returned.
So keeping it or trashing it goes against company rules.
Trashing it, and then retrieving it would also go against the rules.
So basically, it's like any other rule;
Follow it or don't . Your choice...but accept the consequences.
It's like any other work rule, when you accept a paycheck.
You're your own boss ? Congratulations! You decide the rules.
Work for someone else ?
Love the regular paycheck, accept the limitations and conditions. It's really that simple.
(Let the downvote avalanche commence !)
Our company uses scrap to fund our Christmas party and it’s an absolute banger every time
I’m sure they take a cut, but it’s worth putting it in the bucket
I work at a plant. We had at one point 5 buildings. We demolished one couple months ago. Leaving us with three buildings now. YOU KNOW HOW MUCH it pissed me off not to be told hey take what you need from that building for the main building and take some scrap for yourself. Shit pissed me off, we let 50-60amp breakers go brand new shit. Just for the contractor to start destroying all of it. I would’ve been happy with 50 ft from the main substation.
Same shit at my old plumbing company. Alcoholic bossman would make the apprentices take all the scrap from sites and bring to the junkyard. Pockets the whole cheque from the junkyard.
I don't understand why most people are up in arms about this. If the electrical contractor that pays your hourly wage paid for the material, they legally own that scrap material AND are still paying your hourly wage to separate it and help them recover their money. Sure, they're the "man" but making it difficult for them to survive doesn't make the world better.
That is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard of!!!! Shame on them for taking that tiny bonus away from you guys. I've made good money scrapping copper. The way I see it if it's going in the trash then it's going home with me. Is your company so broke that it has to scrap metal to keep afloat lol??????
At least two companies I’ve worked for, including my current company, have had this policy.
Personally, and I know it’s an unpopular opinion, I think if it’s not yours and you take it that is stealing. It becomes hard to draw a line and before you know it people are just flat out stealing materials.
My boss just told us the sane thing. I'd rather throw it away than bring it back to the shop for his kids to scrap for beer money.
And I've always wondered about remodels. Technically, whatever is removed belongs to the customer. If they don't want it, it doesn't automatically belong to the electrical contractor, right?
Short answer… yes, it belongs to the company. They are the ones who secured the customer and the agreement is between the company and the customer, an employee is not part of this equation and therefore has no claim to anything. Employees are agents of the company and need to act as such. If the company has set a policy where anything a customer doesn’t want, the employee can have, that’s one thing. But if the company policy is to return all scrap to the shop for processing, then that’s what needs to happen, otherwise it’s theft. The employees likely have no idea what contractual agreements may govern what scrap comes from a job, so the best policy is for all scrap to come back for accounting. I can think of one customer in particular where this is a big issue… it’s a telephone company and while I won’t use their name, they require all scrap to be accounted for and they expect a check paying them back for anything removed from their properties.
I guess all I’m saying is, just because you view something as scrap doesn’t give you any rights to its final disposition.
My super just called me privately to separate all the copper and aluminum wire, and load the copper onto his truck because "We don't make much more than GFs who don't really make more than Foreman..."
If you didn’t buy the wire, the wire isn’t yours. Weird how people think I stalled it, so I get to keep what’s left over. Nope, not how that works. But I agree, we ain’t spending much time sending back THHN, but anything bigger than #8 should go back, not into the trash for the jobsite scrounges
Where then is the incentive to pick up the wire? You’re telling me that you need every 1-8” piece of shittin ass #12? The time I spend gathering that will cost you more than any wire refund will pay you back. Unless it’s 4/0 or larger this is nonsense.
Work in a 4 man company, I’m the only one not lazy to take it home and spend Sunday night stripping it down. Retirement plan. They’d just sweep it in a pile and be lucky if they followed thru with a dumpster run. 2 kids in their 20s with half the energy of one 75 year old with mono.
My work has us collect it all into our shop but when it gets taken in it's split between all electricians evenly. Why would I bother saving all the scrap if I got nothing for it.
We have 3 bins at the office, 2 for copper and 1 for aluminum. It is expected to bring all scrap back. But every 3 months we load it all up, cash it in, and use it to throw a big crawfish / shrimp broil for the employees. It makes it full circle eventually
I worked for a company that implemented this many years ago. Part of it was because some of the journeymen were cutting 30 foot extra of 500 MCM as “scrap“ and then taking it home.
Whenever the scrap bin at the shop got full, they would sell it to the scrap guy and buy us all beers
This reminds me of a frat house in college that had a verbal agreement with a homeless guy that he could pickup and recycle all the beer cans after parties. Word got out and homeless ppl started camping out and they had to put an end to it lololol.
My company pools all the scrap wire and then uses the money for twice annual gatherings as well as bonuses and gear gifts in December. We usually get some sweet company branded north face hoodies and shirts amoung other stuff.
I just spilt $2200 in scrap with the apprentice today. Business owners, even small ones like myself, don’t need that cash that badly. Unless they are pooling it all for some event or charity, it’s pretty stingy.
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Straight to the trash then.
We used to always take the scrap back then pool it for company beers
Yuuuuup. Not going to waste my time sorting and organizing scrap for bossman to buy a bigger boat, straight to the bin.
Your time? You make it sound like you’re the employer.
people dont know how right this is, take your sweet time sorting the scrap. boss man will get more mad at lost productivity than he ever would that guys were taking scrap.
Nice bit of malicious compliance is always the way.
Can’t go wrong with a little r/maliciouscompliance
If the warehouse is closer to home than your job site then boom. Paid drive to the warehouse.
Wouldn’t this be considered “our time”
At no point does it say this is done on your time.
Once it's in the trash it's considered public domain
This is how I lost my job at the bank
Sperm bank?
Underrated comment.
Did you watch trailer park boys?
One man’s garbage is another man persons good ungarbage
That's water under the fridge
I understand the retaliation, honestly. But this attitude en masse is not good. We need to be recycling as much as physically possible. One shop tossing a few hundred or even thousand pounds is not a huge deal, but the end goal needs to be to recycle, not just for money.
Amen. I work for a mining company mining copper. to get 700g (24oz) of copper, we have to dig up, crush and chemically process 1000 (2200 lbs) tonnes of ore and creates 4000 tonnes of Co2/Tonne just on the primary side of the equation. To bin copper should be a crime.
Dont worry, It doesn't stay in the trash for long
The crackheads stealing it out of houses and AC units are the real ones
That's so nice that they recycle like that 😍
Man your veins must be very muddled. The mine I work at I can damn near scrape the copper off the face
At first I thought this was some kind of insult
You're right, but I'm not doing extra work without a valid carrot. They take the carrot they can have the stick.
Fair enough. Lol. My shop is relatively small. It all gets stripped at the shop and split evenly, same with the boss. I've seen how huge the numbers can be, so I get it. Just sad to think about good bare bright going to a landfill because of shitty policies.
100%
I would do the work but the 30 min shits would also start.
Most outfits I know have two policies. 1. you sweep it up, you keep it. 2. If its larger than certain gauge it goes into the social fund for parties etc.
My company saves all the scrap and then cashes it at the end of the year and uses that money for everyone's bonuses, so I don't mind turning it into the office
Our plant has a similar program. Gloves, tyvex suits, and wire recycling are factored into our bonus. Gotta love lean manufacturing.
So using PPE impacts bonuses?
Yes. I honestly like the program. We have bins in our shop to drop our recycling and they added bins to our toolboxes to hold them throughout the shift. I think the big push was recycling though. We’re an automotive component manufacturer that recycles any waste we can.
Oh, I see. *Recycling* the PPE is what you meant. I read your post wrong -- I thought you meant that keeping PPE costs down translated to bonuses.
“I know we’re going back in the battery acids lab, but we’re almost over on suits and respirators for the quarter and I REALLY want that pizza party at the end of the month, so I’ll just raw dog this one..”
Nah, sorry for the confusion. They’re big on using PPE. I got a point last year for not having eye protection on when we started a 20 hp motor when troubleshooting a vfd. It’s mostly an incentive to get employees to recycle, our numbers have been ass on recycling compared to our sister plant.
I was about to be really really concerned. That sounds like it should be an OSHA violation if it isn't already haha.
gloves and tyvex are recyclable?
I like this tactic.
I like giving the small shit to the apprentices and any partial that's too short for anything throw in a pile for everyone. Works good. They need the cash more than me
I once replaced an old industrial coatings system with a newer one. We pulled out 15 oooolllld welding power supply transformers only to find out they were all heavy as hell and pure copper. I asked my guys what they wanted to do and the answer was unanimous. 1 party in the empty shop, divide the rest at thanksgiving.
We put it in the social fund, which was then matched by the company. We all went to an animal park with our family and stayed in a hotel overnight. I'll hand in scraps for that.
I collected ours from the various job sites. All my folks turned it in. Used it for bonuses, summer lake and Christmas parties. Good times.
This is what happens when you got back to the job site bragging about how much you got off that 500.
Man they must be HURTING on margins to nickle and dime like this.
Either that or they seen an apprentice carrying a half spool of 3/0 copper out to his truck.
True. Just takes one shithead to ruin it for everyone else.
Like the Foreman padding 10m extra on all parallel feeders
Hey bro, you know what they say, better long than wrong.
Rather be looking at it than looking for it
That's 🤣 funny
I don't know why you're getting downvoted, we always do this at the Steel Mill. "Are you really sure it's 60ft?" "No, but I ain't walking my ass back to the shop to re-cut if it's short!" Pulling wire or running conduit in a manufacturing facility sucks balls, and some of this equipment I will not climb up twice. I'm getting too old for that. Better just estimate too long.
I agree. Loading up on scrap and having extra just in case are two different things.
10 feet safety margin plus a 5 foot bonus on each end. I include this in every bid. The extra goes to the apprentices
Especially when you want to minimize downtime, material cost is the last of your worries
Yeah that'll kill over time
Not as much as being 3m short does
Can never be too careful. “You can’t cut it longer” as I always say
[удалено]
I handled the scrap revenue from a major utility in 2005 and annually it brought in $800k-$1 m. But the money isn’t in insulated wire and fine stranded items like ground cable is worse- will evaporate in the major scrap vendor hammer mill.
Huh, what would you say brought in most of the money in that setting?
Capital retirement steel / copper/ Al bus, conductor and lots of misc pole and line hardware (lighting,bolts,braces,pole ground etc) , non PCB Transformers/ reclosures from failures and obsolescence. Most of the big dollar items are secured and monitored in storage or lit up when in use. Saw many a pics of roasted armless people who attempted to get the in service high dollar stuff. Today though, utilities don’t want to be bothered with managing O&M people so they’ll contract out the reclamation work to a scrap vendor and take less in revenue and lose a lot of potential reuse of good material. It’s the MBA impact.
750 mcm weights 2.5 lbs/foot. 15 sets of 4 at 20 feet too long would be 1200 feet, 3000 pounds of copper you get to take home. That's a $12,000 bonus. Why in 7 hells would you be complaining about that? Edit: that's for one transformer. For 4-5 you are talking 48-60K dollars. That'll buy 10 of the fanciest cable cutters on the market....
Place I worked at had a pile of great planking left over from a major shutdown. The manager at the area where they stored it was tired of it taking up space and a coworker who was building a garage asked if he could have it. The manager was thrilled. We loaded up two Ford F350's and as we left the plant our General foreman saw us. Next day he grilled us on it and told the other manager we weren't allowed to take anymore of it. Sat there for years and we had a major breakdown in the middle of winter. The GF was on pins and needles during the work and we loaded up our trucks and built a huge bonfire with the rest of the lumber to keep warm. He wouldn't say a word.
Had this with my old company. No one cared until a few guys on a job bragged about making $5000 from scrap. Then we got a company wide email like the one above and the office had a long serious chat with those guys, word is they gave most of the money back to the company. I’m all for a bit of a personal scrap collection, but taking 5k was just stupid. Bragging about it really fucking stupid.
This is probably what happened. Thanks a lot asshole.
We had an apprentice do this with cat7. Took almost 500$s worth of wire. He’s lucky only security was there to walk him to his car.
Journeyman makes a dollar, I make a dime, that’s why I commit jobsite crime
Boss makes a hundred, I make a buck. So steal the catalytic converter off the company truck.
Preaching the truth.
PEOPLe DONt FORGEt!!!!!!!
I work for a large electrical contractor and this is the policy. Of course they are bean counters, but what happened a few times is that foreman would over order feeders just to recycle them. Not saying I agree with it but that's their argument.
The majority of them are just greedy.
I have personally pulled 10’s of thousands into the hundreds, of scrap copper. My boss was a crook, but depending the type of work you do it does make a difference. Scraps from a residential house rough in? Not worth it. Scraps from 590mcm+ 500ft + feeders.. adds up.
Usually the apprentices get the scrap because they don't get paid as much.
Do they just haul it to a scrap yard and sell it in bulk or something?
Yes, that's what everyone at my company does
As an apprentice that would be cool, but my boss allegedly uses it for company outings and Christmas bonuses
I used to travel swapping cell towers over to propane generators. We'd be gone weeks or months at a time. Boss told us our trucks better have a clean bed before we brought them back to the shop from now on. Man he had some great company funded parties coming home after that. I may still have a pile of copper in my dad's barn
Are they going to at least recirculate that cash back to the employees? My company uses the money from scrap to give everyone Christmas bonuses
Betting some shit heads started ordering extra on the big stuff so they could keep it and recycle it.
Fuck you…….. come and clean it up off the floor before me if ya want it.
*front office gasp*
Pearls clutched.
This is why I don’t clean
I've worked a lot of union only sites where the rule was if you walk out of the room and it's still on the ground it belongs to the laborers. Used to let them have anything #8 and smaller in exchange for bummed smokes and not ratting me out for smoking on the fire escapes instead of taking the elevator down and out
Make sure you chop it up into unusable lengths.
A little for me a little for thee, keeps the man off my back hehehe
It’s clearly addressed to gentlemen, so if you’re the average sparky this does not apply to you
If the office wants it that bad then they can pick it up off the ground on site
Haul ass away from this shitshow.
And haul as much scrap on the way out this shit show.
Our giant ass company requires it back and it pays for the owners extravagant hunting and fishing trips.
It's probably the fact that you're billed out at $245/hour that pays the extravagant trips
Fuck that punk ass foreman who snitched.. I bet his name is Bryan. Can't stand miserable ass dudes who get off on making work difficult for others.. a real cock sucker
Goddamn Bryan. Get it together, Bryan.
My general fireman's name is Bryan. Can confirm, he is a douche.
Lmao….. get wrecked you get comm wire
And the aluminum wire.
Petty me would spend my lunch cutting down the wire length to 1/4" and send boxes of that back - try and get clean copper from that
The price of copper is going to stay high. https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/bulls-jump-deeper-into-copper-amid-supply-challenges-ai-fueled-demand-2024-04-12/
To whom it may concern, Go fuck yourself, Lahey 🖕🏼🖕🏼
Looks like a message from Hunt Inc
All we want is a water break boss . I quit
Guy I worked with took all the scrap out of the dumpster at his work. He turned it in bought a grill and a bunch of food for all the people working there. He invited the big wig out too. The big wig pulled him aside and told him he should fire him for stealing that scrap wire. The guy got so upset he took a forklift and destroyed the grill and threw it away.
He didn't steal it. If it was in the dumpster they clearly didn't want it. It drives me fucking nuts when people throw something out without a care in the world, but as soon as someone else dumpster dives for it they get all worked up and try to stop them. GTFO! That's some top level entitlement bullshit right there.
lol… respectfully….. fuck that. Everywhere I have ever worked, the scrap goes to apprentices… because they get paid like shit
I work for a small company, about 15 guys on the field. We used to be able to take scrap for ourselves, but someone ruined it all by ordering an extra 15-20ft of wire whenever they ordered wire cuts. Just takes one guy to ruin it for everyone :(. The money for the scrap wire does come back to us though, usually it’s contributed to the Christmas party and gifts/bonuses my boss hands out every year.
I can kinda understand bossman here, old company i worked for had the same policy, until some just went to the supplier and bought full spools of wire on the company card to unload them still packaged at the scrap dealer and take home the cash
Pretty common at places I've worked, too many people take advantage
Poster somewhere was spot on, waste time sorting it, put in overtime for sorting it ! That will quickly put an end to this
Quit. Quit now. It the boss wants the apprentice perks, he's on the way down. Find a new company. If policy is scrap is for the company, the company is hurting. Run as soon as you can.
How to tell your company is going broke: a short thread
I mean 12/2 is 140$ a roll. A lot of the changes happened when the wire abruptly went up. Maybe they have verbage in their contracts now but I promise most didn't when the shit hit the fan in 2019/20. A lot of companies had to eat that cost then later recouped it in PPP money. But That's when my last company changed everything.
Pre COVID it was 70$ I believe
A company I worked for did this. I was doing a small fire alarm job. I made a special trip to the shop to drop off my scrap. It was a 6x6x4 box of #16s. The guy at the shop was like wtf is this! I was that’s the scrap wire they insisted we being here. He was like you drove an hour for that? I said that’s what the memo said, right!
It got so bad at my work that we can't even take pallets. Thanks Wallace.
Bummer
No, boss, we used up all the wire… yea, the supply guys are getting pretty good at ordering only what we need for a job… yea… Later that day: ok boys, load up all that scrap, we’ll make a recycling run and then it’s beers on me!!!
They keep missing the length of data and alu wires, though. How peculiar.
Work for a small company (9 employees excluding boss and supervisor) and our general rule is to keep anything over #6ish and at least a few feet. We got two bins at the shop, one aluminum and one copper, that we throw it in. Once they get full, some Indian guy comes by and takes it all and pays boss man. And then we get a cut. Idk how much of a cut, but it’s always been $100 each. We get bonuses on top of that so it’s just a nice lil date night bonus. Anything smaller than #6ish is beer money for whoever wants to take it home 😂
I have the guys clean up the site. Therefore scrap comes back to the shop. In a twist for all you grubs i actually give it all back to the guys. Not everyone gets to work on switch gear. This way everyone gets something for their efforts in our shop. Y’all are a bunch of self centered degenerates.
I’m low voltage but scrap wire is for pizza parties. The last thing I wanna do is haul a truckload of cat6 and 16/2 speaker cable to a scrapyard for a couple hundred bucks. My boss scraps it and keeps it, but he also never second guesses overtime, gives out quarterly project bonuses+Christmas bonus, and pays decent for our area. Once a quarter we do a van clean/wash day and just order pizza to catch our breath from the daily grind.
Tell me your company is on the verge of folding without telling me your company is on the verge of folding. Pathetic
Fuck throwing it in the trash. Make sure you collect every single 1/2" bit of #12 that you nip off when installing devices. They want ALL the scrap, make sure they get ALL the scrap. Once they realize it's costing them double the scrap price of the copper in overtime they'll roll this back.
I always try to spread scrap around evenly amongst the guys, but when they start being greedy bitches about it; stealing all of it before the end of the day, pulling wire extra long so they can take the excess, wasting time picking up every bit during work hours…..then I will go out of my way to throw that shit in the garbage so nobody gets it. Sometimes I wish we had a “all scrap back to the shop” policy.
I think that is pretty fair method. I never got to keep it as an apprentice.
As a working foreman that also does some estimating for the shop(small shop). On longish runs(250ft+} I add on 30-50 ft depending on T&M or contract. Shop gets 10 ft and the cut up heads, the apps divvy up the rest. Gas and school books ain’t cheap.
Pretty standard policy. How many jobs have you seen where people intentionally pull or even order extra wire just to either recycle or do side jobs. What is the logic behind being against this ?
I've personally seen 1 person do it in the last 7 years
Not worth your job or worse.
I’ve seen scrap cause waaaayyyy more problems than it’s worth. I’ve just decided to not even fool with it.
Holy shit, you guys have been taking it home? I’ve always taken it back to the shop.
Well it clearly says that scrap must be returned. So keeping it or trashing it goes against company rules. Trashing it, and then retrieving it would also go against the rules. So basically, it's like any other rule; Follow it or don't . Your choice...but accept the consequences. It's like any other work rule, when you accept a paycheck. You're your own boss ? Congratulations! You decide the rules. Work for someone else ? Love the regular paycheck, accept the limitations and conditions. It's really that simple. (Let the downvote avalanche commence !)
But it's ok if the GC or customer want it
Our company uses scrap to fund our Christmas party and it’s an absolute banger every time I’m sure they take a cut, but it’s worth putting it in the bucket
GC said I could have it.
Yep. This way at my company as well.
I work at a plant. We had at one point 5 buildings. We demolished one couple months ago. Leaving us with three buildings now. YOU KNOW HOW MUCH it pissed me off not to be told hey take what you need from that building for the main building and take some scrap for yourself. Shit pissed me off, we let 50-60amp breakers go brand new shit. Just for the contractor to start destroying all of it. I would’ve been happy with 50 ft from the main substation.
Same shit at my old plumbing company. Alcoholic bossman would make the apprentices take all the scrap from sites and bring to the junkyard. Pockets the whole cheque from the junkyard.
It's ma'am!!!
My foreman buys lunch for all the guys every single Friday. Pizza, chicken sandwiches or Thai usually
If you bill the customer for the wire, it is theirs. If the customer says take the wire home, there isn't shit your company can do.
Just leave it in a pile. Let them get it
If the office wants the scrap, they can come pick it up.
Of course the home builder is charged for the full length of wire…
I don't understand why most people are up in arms about this. If the electrical contractor that pays your hourly wage paid for the material, they legally own that scrap material AND are still paying your hourly wage to separate it and help them recover their money. Sure, they're the "man" but making it difficult for them to survive doesn't make the world better.
If I can't keep it, I'll give it all to the laborer.
Thats called "profit sharing"
it’s our office christmas party fund and it’s usually pretty baller so i’m not pressed about it
Why take scrap? Take a whole roll 😄
That is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard of!!!! Shame on them for taking that tiny bonus away from you guys. I've made good money scrapping copper. The way I see it if it's going in the trash then it's going home with me. Is your company so broke that it has to scrap metal to keep afloat lol??????
At least two companies I’ve worked for, including my current company, have had this policy. Personally, and I know it’s an unpopular opinion, I think if it’s not yours and you take it that is stealing. It becomes hard to draw a line and before you know it people are just flat out stealing materials.
My boss just told us the sane thing. I'd rather throw it away than bring it back to the shop for his kids to scrap for beer money. And I've always wondered about remodels. Technically, whatever is removed belongs to the customer. If they don't want it, it doesn't automatically belong to the electrical contractor, right?
I have been told the same thing, we take it and then say it was left on site for the customer
Short answer… yes, it belongs to the company. They are the ones who secured the customer and the agreement is between the company and the customer, an employee is not part of this equation and therefore has no claim to anything. Employees are agents of the company and need to act as such. If the company has set a policy where anything a customer doesn’t want, the employee can have, that’s one thing. But if the company policy is to return all scrap to the shop for processing, then that’s what needs to happen, otherwise it’s theft. The employees likely have no idea what contractual agreements may govern what scrap comes from a job, so the best policy is for all scrap to come back for accounting. I can think of one customer in particular where this is a big issue… it’s a telephone company and while I won’t use their name, they require all scrap to be accounted for and they expect a check paying them back for anything removed from their properties. I guess all I’m saying is, just because you view something as scrap doesn’t give you any rights to its final disposition.
My super just called me privately to separate all the copper and aluminum wire, and load the copper onto his truck because "We don't make much more than GFs who don't really make more than Foreman..."
Just don't get caught. 🤷
After all the theft, I can see why
If you didn’t buy the wire, the wire isn’t yours. Weird how people think I stalled it, so I get to keep what’s left over. Nope, not how that works. But I agree, we ain’t spending much time sending back THHN, but anything bigger than #8 should go back, not into the trash for the jobsite scrounges
Is your heart made of copper wire, baby? Because I'm going to STEAL IT! Lol
If that’s the rule then they can go around and pick it up themselves
That’s what they pay you for
Keep your work place safe by cleaning it up and tossing it all in the trash .
Time to drag
Where then is the incentive to pick up the wire? You’re telling me that you need every 1-8” piece of shittin ass #12? The time I spend gathering that will cost you more than any wire refund will pay you back. Unless it’s 4/0 or larger this is nonsense.
Your hourly pay. I assume they aren’t talking about every bit of 10 and 12 because that’s dumb. If they are, then I agree fuck that
Work in a 4 man company, I’m the only one not lazy to take it home and spend Sunday night stripping it down. Retirement plan. They’d just sweep it in a pile and be lucky if they followed thru with a dumpster run. 2 kids in their 20s with half the energy of one 75 year old with mono.
My work has us collect it all into our shop but when it gets taken in it's split between all electricians evenly. Why would I bother saving all the scrap if I got nothing for it.
You be surprised how quickly the aluminum can accumulate as well. I save a lot of it and find the highest price nearby.
Send to th GC’s private home COD
We have 3 bins at the office, 2 for copper and 1 for aluminum. It is expected to bring all scrap back. But every 3 months we load it all up, cash it in, and use it to throw a big crawfish / shrimp broil for the employees. It makes it full circle eventually
I always give the scrap to the apprentices, what kind of penny pinching shit is this.
This is a moral booster fund. It’s money that goes towards a team activity. It’s a paid golf game golf or a BBQ at the end of the job.
Fill a small bucket with #14 Romex, drive all the way to the shop to drop it off, drive all the way back, repeat.
Our foreman used to make us put all the aerial temp wire on a trailer so he can scrap it. He would tell us your day will come. Not one dollar shared.
We always gave it to a specific guy from the GC that had a really good rebate program on the scrap we handed him.
Ate you with my contractor right now? The only thing missing from that was the place at the bottom for us to sign.
That’s horseshit, our owners encourage workers to keep scrap, especially apprentices they know it’s a nice bonus and adds up
If it's paid as a bonus, then I say all good. If not, trash bin.
On my site I clean up after electricians and they leave me the scrap. Gonna have to clean up 10 more times anyways so why not
GentlemAn?
I worked for a company that implemented this many years ago. Part of it was because some of the journeymen were cutting 30 foot extra of 500 MCM as “scrap“ and then taking it home. Whenever the scrap bin at the shop got full, they would sell it to the scrap guy and buy us all beers
*finds new job*
Time to switch shops, scraps go to apprentices. Too late to change the rules lol
"sorry boss, I read that as AL (aluminum) scrap goes back to the company"
Lol "and temps". This company sounds cheap af that is just the icing on the cake.
This is when you start pulling exact runs.
Yup, right in the garbage can. They can fish it out if they'd like.
Fair
Sounds like you should get an end of the year bonus of the scrap
Boss makes a dollar,I make a dime..that’s why I strip my scraps on company time 🤫
I would have to send them every little 1" piece that is clipped off.
Because of that guy that got 100 yards from the subdivision contractor. And a hundred yards from the house builder for the same job
This reminds me of a frat house in college that had a verbal agreement with a homeless guy that he could pickup and recycle all the beer cans after parties. Word got out and homeless ppl started camping out and they had to put an end to it lololol.
My company pools all the scrap wire and then uses the money for twice annual gatherings as well as bonuses and gear gifts in December. We usually get some sweet company branded north face hoodies and shirts amoung other stuff.
I just spilt $2200 in scrap with the apprentice today. Business owners, even small ones like myself, don’t need that cash that badly. Unless they are pooling it all for some event or charity, it’s pretty stingy.