Pros
- Pay is decent for the work you'll be doing.
- Plenty of overtime.
- Education and votech opportunities for employees who stick around long-term.
- Your boots are paid for, and welders are given proper PPE and brand new hoods.
- The union at the plant is strong. If you ever feel backed into a corner, call your steward. NEVER answer questions from management or corporate without your steward there to back you up.
Kontras
- Bottom line, it's always going to be your fault. Accountability from management and technicians at this company is absolutely zero. If you get hurt on the job, management will try their hardest to spin it in a way that makes you solely responsible. If you have excessive downtime on a machine, technicians will immediately go to management and call it a failure from the operator before they ever admit that the machine could be at fault. To the technicians, their machines will always be right and never fail.
- Safety is reactive, never proactive. Several of my coworkers have reported safety concerns to our chain of command, and months went by without any sort of address. When an accident happens, management quickly finds a way to prevent it from happening again, even though odds are an employee, or multiple employees, brought up the same safety concern already, just to have it ignored.
- Machine failures are constant. The robotics are unreliable at best and incredibly easy to break. These robots can't see what they're doing; they just follow a pre-determined path. If the parts aren't machined/punched right, the robot will get stuck, and you'll need to call a tech to come fix it. 2nd shift doesn't have a technician, so you're just done for the night. The day shift robotics technician is terrible; he'll blame everything on you, constantly belittle you, and talk down to you, but the moment you snap back at him, he'll walk away and go snitch on you to the plant manager, and you'll go have a sitdown with HR. The night shift technician used to be a welder for the company, so he knows what he's doing, plus he's actually a pretty great dude.
- Training at this plant is a joke. There is no formal training after your orientation; they just stick you with a member of the team who'll teach you how to run a machine. Which I don't have a problem with, except that they'll cut your training short about halfway through to make their productivity numbers look better, regardless of how ready you feel. This has led to accidents, production recalls, and major downtime. Even if you manage to stay safe and your work comes out clean, if you don't make your numbers, supervisors will write you up.
- If you're on a salary, you can mess up as much as you want. The best example of this? If you spent $4 million dollars over the course of two years on a machine that nobody asked for or needed, and after those two years, it still isn't capable of putting out production, what do you think your boss would do to you? Probably fire you before this could've reached the two-year mark. Not here though!
The outlook for this company isn't great right now. The plant is very far behind on orders, with some routers being 8+ months overdue. Customers are leaving in droves for our competitors, because they can deliver simmlar quality at a better price. At the end of the day, I'm glad I'm moving on to greater things. If you're looking for a short-term gig, this might not be a bad fit, but I stayed way longer than I should've.