Well finally got a chance to read through this whole thread, and for starters from one machinist to another...
Hello!
That's truly crap what your going through, and being the only machinist there you would think you have more pull with what you want, so your boss must really be exactly what you stated. We only have three of us here, one is my older brother, the other is one of my three bosses( I call them my three dads
) he is kewl and we all band together, we have to or it is what you described.
It has been a long road for us but we hold a high standard for safety, our machining is different from your though because we run gantry based machines so we cut flat sheets of material out, this can range from typical .063" 5052 or 3003 aluminum all the way up to 1in thick plexiglas that will be 7ft x 10 ft so it can get very dangerous here for us. They neve set standards for material handleing so we took it upon ourselves to set our own rules and basicly told the "suits" that this is how it is and that's how we are doing it. It is truly nice when it goes that way.
I can tell you that if you get fired for all this that you need to add that you were in a hostile work invironment and that will help you and your fight, also with the osha thing its not always good unless you have a few people calling in for them to take the fishing hook the first time. Other wise they take it as a disgruntal employee, they do take note of it though and if more calls come in they start to take action and suprise visits.
Like the other gentlemen in here that are with you, you should make sure and check your options, with all the green stuff going on here in the US there will be plenty of machining jobs coming soon, and on that note world wide we are having a shortage in machinists, there are on average 50,000 machinists retiring every year and only about 15,000 coming into the work force so you can do the math and see we definetly need more of us.
If you have a local tech school hit em up they almost all have machining classes for cheap to get started in, that will help you get your foot in the door to the next best thing. Take pics of the stuff you make also, helps in a resume.
Remember parts are parts don't jepoardize your digits for them, maybe you can get that lathe to fire off some goods at your bosses junk in the trunk as he goes by, then you can say " see this thing is a flyin' piece of doo doo! I need some maintenence over here!"
take care brother.
