Pros
Prior to the plant closure in April 2014, the work was generally quite unique and exciting. Sign projects were rarely alike and this kept things interesting. The St George workforce was like a family. Never have I seen a group of people work so well together with so few problems. Many of the projects we worked on were for extravagant Las Vegas casinos and it was extremely rewarding to see our efforts featured prominently on the Vegas skyline. Compensation varied from poor to through the roof. If you were lucky enough and had the right pedigree (primarily being transplanted to St George from the Las Vegas shop you could make $30 to $40 hr in production, though $15+ was more the norm for us locals). All the usual benefits were available after a year, a bit overpriced but nothing out of the ordinary. I believe the culture and work environment varied greatly from plant to plant. St George was for the most part, a pleasure to work at, and for the last 2 years we had an excellent production manager who really fine tuned our operation and we began to close jobs out significantly under cost. Saving the company far in excess of a million per year in production costs really made us all feel like rock stars.
Kontras
The St. George plant was closed down and +90% of the workforce dismissed in April 2014 when the bank forced YESCO to cut more than six million dollars from their bottom line (contrary to the official story which suggested that they were simply shifting operations to a new location). As mentioned above, pay was hit or miss. The St George branch was an experiment in setting up a low wage facility to see if it was viable. Those people who were transplanted to the St George plant from Las Vegas were commonly paid in the $30 to $40 range. Those who were hired locally for similar positions started at $12 and worked up from there. The St George crew (the locals anyway) worked for a pittance, but we worked extremely hard and for the last 2 years of production we came in millions of dollars under budget. Our significant efforts were ultimately rewarded with a plant closure. The (highly political) decision was made to keep the Phoenix plant (which is widely known within YESCO to have never been profitable in it's existence). People throughout the entire company people were shocked by that decision. Middle management has seemed to be much more occupied with patting each other on the back and gloating over how awesome they are than focusing on the tasks at hand (I'm looking at you Las Vegas) while I suspect corporate management have been so out of touch with the realities of where their operations are heading that they may not yet have seen what is becoming obvious to most of their employees and have absolutely no idea what looms on the horizon for the company.