Piece Rate

[boblocates]

Who is saying $2.50? Where is $2.50 a ticket? I wouldn't locate for $2.50 a ticket. I have a friend in a neighboring state, who works for another company he makes almost 10 bucks a ticket.



-Bob

[sprayandpray]

I believe they are saying $2.50 per locate, not ticket, unless it is a one-way locate area. Personally, I would consider $3.00 per locate as adequate but that would have to include clear tickets. If the company gets paid full price for the locate then I would want my full price also.

[Wingfoot]

Fellas - Just like spray sez, the $2.50 per utility is what Consolidated promised their piece rate locators at the onset of the conversion from hourly pay. A one-way ticket would pay the locator $2.50 and four-way ticket would pay the piece rate locator $10.00.

The problem was, Consolidated had a non-published magic number they were comfortable in paying a locator per paycheck. There were many piece rate Consolidated locators that hit the mother lode; making much more than the magic number. To compensate, the 1st line and the 2nd line sups were closing out cheesy tickets off these piece rate locators, among other "tricks," in order to get these locators closer to the magic number.

The first trick restricted the piece rate locator to $25.00/hour maximum pay. When that didn't work to their approval, it was reduced again to $2.50 per marked utility verified with a photo and $1.25 per unmarked utility.

These Consolidated middle/upper-management types and their thinking didn't go away with the USIC acquisition. They're still with us.

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[locator00566]

USIC will soon figure out a way to pay their employees $2.50 an hour.

[big boots mcghee]

These Consolidated middle/upper-management types and their thinking didn't go away with the USIC acquisition. They're still with us.

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It's a little too obvious that they're still with us since so many of their practices and procedures are being adopted by USIC.

[sprayandpray]

I guess we are lucky down here. We only picked up Supervisors from Consolidated, and Locators. Our DM's are still the same. Of course, USIC hasn't treated us all that well in the last year or so, but somewhat better than Consolidated and UQ treated their employees.

[ProfessionalLocator]

Fellas - Just like spray sez, the $2.50 per utility is what Consolidated promised their piece rate locators at the onset of the conversion from hourly pay. A one-way ticket would pay the locator $2.50 and four-way ticket would pay the piece rate locator $10.00.

The problem was, Consolidated had a non-published magic number they were comfortable in paying a locator per paycheck. There were many piece rate Consolidated locators that hit the mother lode; making much more than the magic number. To compensate, the 1st line and the 2nd line sups were closing out cheesy tickets off these piece rate locators, among other "tricks," in order to get these locators closer to the magic number.

The first trick restricted the piece rate locator to $25.00/hour maximum pay. When that didn't work to their approval, it was reduced again to $2.50 per marked utility verified with a photo and $1.25 per unmarked utility.

These Consolidated middle/upper-management types and their thinking didn't go away with the USIC acquisition. They're still with us.

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There is an old saying in this industry; "that is too much to pay a locator".

When on pay for performance I saw locators get rates of $20 to $25 an hour all the time. These locators did high volume plus low damage rates, some had been damage free for years. Only the best locators got this pay rate and they made for the company a higher profit margin than the lower paid locators. But someone came along and said "that's too much to pay a locator" and cut everybody's pay scale.

Much to their surprise those top paid locators just did not bust their backs to get the same high volume of tickets done after they got a major pay cut of 20%. They had replaced those big cuts with a quarterly bonus of $50. They just could not figure out that people will not make the extra effort unless their is at least something a little extra in it for them. I ran the numbers, that extra pay was just a reasonable percentage of the extra profits they made the company.

[TheCableVine]

I am pro piece rate only because the people I work for pay out good money.

A couple of years ago when we had 2 contracts I was making good money. I can't give you per locate prices but I'll tell you that my largest paycheck was $7,700 and some change. That is getting paid monthly. That is before taxes and expenses but still, it is quite a bit of cash. In the summer my paychecks were close to that. In the winter they'd be about 1/3 of that. Now, we are only running on one contract but I can still pull in a $3-4,000 paycheck now and then in the summer. The winter... not so good. The remaing contract doesn't pay as well as the one we lost. But, I can tell you that I get paid more per locate than the company gets for the locate. I think I get around 60-70% of the locate price. Some tickets I'll get multiple locates.

The money can be made with piece rate but the employer has to loosen the grip.

Take Google for example. They have the adsense program where they let people (this website is one example) display Google ads on their websites. I read the other day that Google pays out something like 68% of the revenue the ad generates. Whether it is a few cents or a few dollars, they pay out the majority of the money to the website owner. If Google believes that is a good business model then I think some of the locate companies should take notice and research it a little closer. What if Google dropped it down to 40%? I think websites would start considering other ad networks. Or, new ad networks would start up to fill the void Google would be leaving.

When I was with STS a while back we went to piece rate (i've mentioned this before) and we made more money as loctors and I heard the company was doing well... BUT, as I understand it, the locators were making more than some of the managers, so they put a stop to it.

[daman1]

I think the key is that you have to earn enough in a pay period to make a decent living. If you struggle financially unless you're at peak production, a bad day can cost a car or mortgage payment. That's when short-cutting for productions sake starts to enter peoples minds.
If your company is able to give those kind of payouts then I I'd think the big guys could too. Just multiply that by several states. When those kind of speadsheet numbers come out at the annual shareholders meeting. All that money paid out. Those folks are gonna want it.

[seeker708]

How would piece rate work with PTO? Would there be some funky math involved? Say, taking your average tickets per day for the last quarter, average hours per day, getting a baseline of an hourly rate, and then multiplying that by your accrued PTO? Because I could see that really screwing someone over if they have to take PTO at the start of a season (birth of a child for instance) and there's not a whole lot of previous data to go off.

Or would PTO become something along the lines of "40 hours of PTO = $600"?

[orangeboots]

Pto is a set hourly wage based on what your piece rate average is but there is a bottom maybe 16.00 same goes for non production time like meetings truck maint etc. It is a max of 25.00 top or a negotiated bottom