It isn’t feasible to be a successful auto technician and a wimp at the same time. It takes a lot of grit to do what a real technician does, not only in the area of the work we do, working on commission, weathering the bad weeks and short paychecks when work is scarce, or a job doesn’t go right.  There are enough issues to deal with in those areas of a technician’s experience.  Those of us who have paid our dues in that arena know the truth of what I just said.  But in a world where the ranks of qualified automotive technicians are steadily dwindling, why is it that some shop owners treat their youngest and most promising techs like second class citizens?  Why do some shop owners seem to believe the technicians in their employ ‘owe their souls to the company store,’ so to speak?  Some shop managers move techs around like pawns on a chessboard and play silly games with the tickets, going out of their way to give the best work to their pet employees while starving other techs out of the business.  I can’t pretend to have the answers to questions like this, but I’ve pondered the subject at length, and here are some anecdotal observations.

It was more than twenty years ago that I put in a few months working at a shop where the manager treated me like royalty for the first my few weeks there, then found one reason after another to do everything in his power to drive me away.  He had me feeling like a slave and I found out as I was packing my tools to leave that in the two years prior to hiring me, he had gone through no fewer than twenty-eight mechanics.  That was quite a feat, considering the fact that he only had two at the time working in his shop, and an average of one tech a month that walked away.  I walked away from that shop too, but I didn’t walk away from the business – I had ten wrench years under my belt at the time, so I just went to work at another shop that treated me a lot better and worked at that place for fifteen years.  

Putting my experience aside, Young folks who aren’t far out of technical college won’t usually be as committed to our industry as I was, and if a new technician is treated badly (and too many are), they’re young enough to either go back to school for some other trade or get another kind of job.  On the other hand, bouncing around from shop to shop is a ride that leads nowhere fast, so I try to place my graduates in good shops to begin with so they’ll stay at their first job.  As diligent as I might try to be, that doesn’t always work.  A lot of shop managers are more concerned about the bottom line at the end of each week than they are about building a meaningful working relationship with a promising technician who may one day be their bread and butter.

One of my earliest students was a young fellow I’ll call Craig.  When Craig was in his last semester and was far enough along to perform, he got ideas about doing some co-op work, and I received a call from a local car dealer who needed a mechanic in his shop – he seemed a pretty decent chap on the phone.  I figured the experience would be good for Craig, who was well capable of doing the work.  How hard could it be?  Well, as it turned out, I discovered (too late) that this particular employer was a foul-mouthed jerk that expected Craig to fix cars like Fonzy (you know, Henry Winkler’s character on Happy Days that could fix any car by whacking it with his fist?).  This employer had Craig working without a shop manual, and when the kid couldn’t make miracles happen with baling wire, a screwdriver and a pair of pliers, well, it’s not too hard to see how that deal turned out.  Craig was halfway through replacing the head gaskets on his mother’s van at my shop, but he was so traumatized by the week of half-days he spent with the used car guy that he never even came back to school.  Some of other students pitched in and finished his mother’s van.  I learned right then and there just how horrible some places can be for a new technician. The last time I heard of Craig, he was delivering pizza.

Sam was a distinguished veteran of the war in Iraq.  He was 27 years old, came into my program with no automotive experience, and did some really good work (to include replacing the engine in a Lexus LS 400, which is no small feat for an automotive student).  He performed just as handsomely in his early months at the garage where I had placed him as he had on the battlefield.  Sam spent two years in that shop before deciding to leave the auto repair business and move on to try something else.  When I asked Sam what went wrong, and why he quit, his answer was simple:

                “I would probably have stayed in this business indefinitely if you had started me at a different shop.  That manager just burned me out to the point that I didn’t want anything else to do with fixing cars.”  It was disappointing to hear Sam say that.  This guy was tough as nails, dedicated, and mature in his work ethic. He was in the shop on time, stayed all day every day, and to me his faithfulness was no surprise.  For just one example, he would find and apply TSBs that the older techs hadn’t even bothered to look up, repairing problem vehicles in short order, saving the shop and its customers’ money and reducing vehicle down time dramatically.   But as first one disgruntled tech and then another left  that shop and he was repeatedly called on to complete the big jobs they had left undone (who can turn any labor hours looking for somebody else’s bolts and brackets?), Sam grew weary of the grind and decided to move on.  And while a lot of techs change jobs regularly, it seems plain to me that all those other guys left for some reason – like the guy I worked for all those years ago, a shop manager with high technician turnover doesn’t generally realize he’s the one with the problem.

Another graduate of mine (I’ll call him Joe) immediately went to work at a big shop to slide into a driveability service bay that had been vacated by a guy who wanted to try his hand at handling customers and writing tickets.  Everybody in the shop agreed that Joe was a lot better at driveability and electronics work than the tech-turned service writer who had shucked his blue collar moved to the front aisle. 

Joe was happy with the job and consistently turning 50+ hours a week without a comeback, but none of that mattered.  Why?  Well, the tech Joe had replaced (and was outperforming) decided he didn’t want to write service anymore and immediately made good on a secret promise he had extracted from the shop manager, who moved him back into the driveability bay and bumped Joe out of the driveability bay and back onto the line.  It wasn’t that Joe couldn’t do the line work – it was just that he never got over the injustice of the whole thing, and for awhile, he mothballed his tools and took a grass-cutting job at a country club just to get out of the car repair business and get over the whole thing.  Fortunately, I coaxed him back into another shop, where he has become the go-to guy for everything and today he makes good money doing transmissions in an environment where he’s treated with respect.  The manager at the first shop has repeatedly tried to re-hire him, but to no avail.

When Alan (not his real name) first went into the field, he was 20 years old working for $8 an hour clock time just to get his foot in the door of a shop, and since his flags weren’t tied to his pay, that shop manager would steal his flags (Alan was doing all the automatic transmissions at that shop and was turning a respectable number of labor hours), and give them to older, more seasoned technicians to keep them happy. That in and of itself was bad enough, but then the manager used the reduced hours that showed up on Alan’s flag sheet as justification for cutting Alan’s pay.  I know, I know, you and I might have taken the service manager by the throat, but this kid is kind of humble and doesn’t complain much. He did, however, share with me what the shop manager was doing, so I found him a job at another shop.

Fast forward four years.  Alan shows up for work 40 minutes early and opens the shop, empties the garbage cans and turns on the lights and compressors, and as often as not he’s the last one to leave in the evening. He has sterling integrity and volunteers to absorb the cost of any mistake he makes.  When the work day starts, Alan can do just about anything from brakes and alignments to driveability and electronics.  He owns about $12,000 worth of tools, and has six ASE certifications with plans to get the other two this year.  Would you like to have a guy like Alan in your shop?  Still, the shop manager doesn’t pay Alan as much as he does the other guys who come and go with such regularity. Why?  Because Alan doesn’t complain. Amazingly, Alan has remained in the field in spite of the setbacks he has experienced.

Then we have the shop owners who do it right.  One owner/manager told me that he never needs any new mechanics because all of his guys have been with him for nearly two decades. He’s careful about who he hires, treats them with respect, pays a generous straight time wage, AND covers the entire cost of their health insurance. The shop is open five days a week – no Saturdays. No wonder his guys never go anywhere!  They show up for work every day and turn a lot of labor because they know how well (and by whom) their bread is buttered.  If that isn’t enough, this same shop wins one customer satisfaction award after another, has all the work he can do ALL YEAR AROUND and makes a lot of money in the process.

In a world where there are so many career choices and where technicians of all ages are leaving the industry in droves, we need to make automotive repair careers more attractive and more rewarding across the board, else we may find ourselves embroiled in a crisis of Biblical proportions in this industry.