Severely underpaid, no meaningful advancement prospects - Anonymous employee Expeditors Employee Review

I need to start off with an apology for the vagueness of some of the following comments. My department is small and is a professional field performing a job function that unrelated but necessary to the company’s core logistics business. My writing is distinctive and I would be immediately identified. I am deeply unhappy with my job. Working here is a never ending reminder that my employer doesn’t value my work and a daily exercise in career stagnation. I’ve been at Expeditors for a while (over 5 years) and my salary is still less than what an associate’s first year starting salary is. Adjusted for inflation, I am making less than when I first started. I’ve been speaking with job recruiters at other companies and they are all shocked that I make less than them. One of my co-workers recently left and said that she received three different job offers from other companies with starting salaries that were almost double what she made at Expeditors. I don’t even know what my job description is. They hastily made some up when they were trying to promote the head of my team to take over the department. However, I guess it doesnt really matter what it says because I am expected to do work that exceeds my pay grade without being appropriately compensated. The descriptions also looked so ad hoc I didn’t know how seriously to take them. Compensation structure is opaque. I have no idea how raises are given or what they are based on. We are supposed to receive cost of living adjustments automatically, but I had to always ask about it first. This matters less for me, but I imagine it’s a burden on our admin staff. As far as advancement opportunities, I am fairly confident that if I stayed here for another decade, I will still be in my dead end position and more depressed about my future than I already am. My work product is excellent and I bring a lot to the table, but I know I will likely never be rewarded for it. This is a demoralizing realization to make 5 years in. Getting them to pay for things that normal employers (in my field) pay for (like mandatory training required for our licensing) is like pulling teeth. There is no written policy on this and they keep claiming they don’t have enough money to cover these things. I find this difficult to believe. Senior management is inflexible and still stuck in a pre-pandemic mindset about employee expectations. We rushed to return to the office while the delta and omicron surges were raging for no apparent reason other than a vague need to “maintain company culture.” If this is true, then that’s pretty grim. Day in and day out, we sit alone in our offices with no interactions between coworkers and have meetings with each other via Zoom. This is not company culture. This is management micromanaging because they don’t think we’re doing work when they’re not looking. If this continues, Expeditors won’t be able to attract the best and brightest in the future. In fact, the company was aware of this even before the pandemic. They couldn’t retain IS/IT resources so they decided to offer more attractive work week scheduling that differed from the rest of the company. What’s most upsetting about this revelation is that the company knows what it needs to do if it’s having trouble attracting labor, but just won’t do it. The resistance is puzzling. C-Suite is full of vaccine skeptics. They seem to be held to different standards about covid reporting and masking. I know for a fact that several of them had covid and were still going around to different floors people’s offices without masks. Unvaccinated employees are required to mask, but our unvaccinated president of global products was walking around without a mask when he caught covid last year. In the main corporate headquarters, we’ve been getting new infections weekly. The company also appears to be tired of hearing from its employees. We used to have an annual employee satisfaction survey. However, they stopped conducting it because “they kept getting the same responses every year.” I won’t insult the reader by walking through why I think that line of logic is deeply flawed. If the company never seriously intended to take action on the responses, then getting rid of the survey was, perversely, an efficiency improvement. Diversity and inclusion? What diversity and inclusion? Leadership is comprised of old white sexist and homophobic men. These are not just words—there have been lawsuits (“you need a good f- - - ing” is a choice passage from one of the complaints brought against someone in management). This old-school boys club attitude is deeply entrenched. The current head of Europe lost out on the CEO position years ago for a reason. Now we’re stuck with the founder’s son-in-law as the CEO. Speaking of the CEO, I do not like his attitude about employer/employee dynamics. He thinks employees have too much power and shared this with our department when asked about parental leave policies. Look, at the very least, frame those thoughts about employees in a less abrasive and accusatory way, especially when vocalising those thoughts to the employees themselves. Finally, the CEO is sometimes terrible at reading a room. He was at one of our EU branches and went on a rant about Obama for some reason and didn’t seem to understand why everyone was so uncomfortable. I dont care what he believes, but it was inappropriate and irrelevant to the situation. Jeff—not everyone shares your opinion. I have so many other things to say about why working here has sucked what little excitement I had for my profession out of me, but in the end, it seems futile. But mostly, I am just angry that I’ve wasted so much of my youth here before seeing the company for what it really is.