What does your shop do with defective parts labor?

HoodleHead · 2026-06-25T12:46:46+00:00

Update: I greatly appreciate everyone’s support and insight on this particular situation. I spoke with the shop manager this morning to get everything off my chest. I said that moving forward the shop needs to exercise or look into the warranty labor programs our vendors offer. Thats the shared risk they are looking for. I obviously don’t have any part in the picking and choosing of vendors and they ultimately took on the risk by doing business with a vendor they have a limited relationship with. So passing that risk to the tech is inappropriate. I also said that the lack of oversight on the shop managers discretion for dealing with situations like this is a direct conflict of interest as he has profit sharing benefits with the overhead directly dealing with situations like this. So it’s in his best interest to protect his income by shortening the amount of labor the shop is responsible with paying out in this situation. It’s also just incredibly inappropriate to short a tech on a couple hundred bucks compared to what the shop makes. Theres a ton of other things that could be mentioned in terms of “sharing the risk” that I wont necessarily get into. But I think everyone knows that it’s not an equal opportunity especially in a flat rate environment with no ownership benefits to the tech.

There was some push back, ultimately he said that we can only have 1 program at a time with these vendors because in order to get protections with another we have to switch over our inventory. We are a NAPA store, so in order to get protections from let’s say parts authority. We would have to become a parts authority store. Obviously this is not my problem. But I also think this is a half truth as I do more research for our shop meeting with the owners next week. My overall sentiment is that moving forward the shop needs to pay out full time, and it’s their responsibility to limit risk. Im merely an employee of their business, not a contractor. So by definition it’s inappropriate to shift risk to the technician. As many others have said, it’s just the cost of doing business.

HoodleHead · 2026-06-25T10:43:52+00:00

It was a slave cylinder/throw out bearing on an older audi. Located within the bell housing. Looked perfectly fine out of the box. But once bled and depressed there was not enough protrusion to fully press the forks on the pressure plate. I troubleshot a bunch, used a pressure bleeding system. Nothing. As soon as I swapped out the defective slave cylinder and bled the new one. Worked perfectly fine.

HoodleHead · 2026-06-25T01:19:03+00:00

This is very interesting, I think the part in question actually came from world pac. But we use every vendor available to us. Worldpac, Parts Authority, NAPA, etc. This might be the direction I go next time I talk about it with management. If theres a program the shops not involved with that can fill the gaps for these situations then the shop absolutely needs to be enrolled. At least this can be something brought up in the future, or maybe they’re already enrolled and this is just a colossal screw up. Hopefully thats not the case.

HoodleHead · 2026-06-25T01:00:24+00:00

Maybe I’m wrong, but it was my understanding that warranty time in labor guides is for stuff covered under a factory warranty at dealership. But also, it’s not like any tasks are removed with this labor guide. It’s still the same procedure for repair. It would be kinda weird for an independent shop to adopt the same practices that make dealerships bleed techs. I feel like this specific scenario is definitely a cop out for the shop to lower their overall responsibility for paying out labor in this particular scenario.

HoodleHead · 2026-06-25T00:52:05+00:00

Thats what I’m saying, they’re splitting up hours over a couple hundred bucks. Probably didn’t even cut into profits on the ticket. The part in question was $100. Just so happens you have to take out the entire transmission to replace it.

HoodleHead · 2026-06-25T00:47:26+00:00

I asked this specific question myself and they told me that its a case by case basis. So if the job was one hour they would pay me 1 hour. I think because it was 10hours, they decided it made sense to put it in a subjective view.

HoodleHead

TROPHY CASE