Pros
- Pay is pretty good for an entry level position that requires no advanced education <br> - Don't have to deal with customer service or wear any sort of uniform <br> - Don't sit at a desk all day, get to move around a lot and use your muscles <br> - Half the coworkers are generally good, funny people
Cons
- Promotion has nothing to do with merit, you just wait your turn (which could be the better part of a decade) - Constantly understaffed. Instead of hiring more people, they work the same people harder and longer. - There is little to no preparation or communication. Backups aren't trained at every position. Vital knowledge is not spread amongst multiple people. Nothing is done ahead of time. - Career workers are not responsible for anything and typically don't pull their own weight, as they are near-impossible to fire. It would take illegal activity and even then, they're usually suspended for a few months and return with backpay. The ones in our plant love to bid and re-bid jobs constantly, so we never have openings stay open long enough to justify converting more PSEs/hiring more people. - PSEs are treated like on-call employees. I've been called at noon on a Sunday and told I was supposed to be there ready to work a full shift in two and a half hours. Three times in as many weeks I was given less than 24 hrs notice that I had to work an extra day when they clearly knew in advance and could've given us warning. There's no respect for employees' personal lives. This year we did two months of 10 hr day, 6 day weeks before the holiday casuals came in. We do a lot of overtime for a job that is contractually-mandated to be part-to-full time. - Easy to get injured. Almost every career employee has some sort of long term injury from doing the same, repetitive movements day in, day out. I had one such injury because mgmt got lazy and put the same PSEs in the same roles every day. I asked to be rotated around once in a while to give the problem area time to heal a bit and was told, "we don't have enough people for a rotation." Nope--four other PSEs knew how to do the job and all were at work that day. I said as much and was told with a shrug, "I can't make everyone happy." It took going to the doctor--who was astonished I was being worked so much (walking 11 miles a day)--and getting a note to apparently discover we did, in fact, have enough people for a rotation after all! - Supervisors wait until the last minute to issue overtime--overtime that is often in violation of union rules (length of overtime, order of seniority). Many of the PSEs on my shift started saving their second break because they never knew when they'd be leaving. It wasn't a secret; it was open, continuous behavior. No one mentioned it being a problem. Then one day a supervisor flipped out and said if PSEs kept saving and combining breaks, he was, "going to take them away!" A) That's an illegal violation of labor laws. B) We didn't know he had a problem with it because he never said a word about it. The levels of maturity and respect demonstrated by supervisors are constantly subpar. - Absolutely zero communication, either supervisor to supervisor or supervisor to employee. - Management doesn't do paperwork, meaning lazy workers, repeat offenders, and people who are a danger to those around them remain employed. It also means shipments of workplace supplies and mail often go unscheduled. - PSEs aren't eligible for health insurance or other benefits for the first year, and are technically fired and re-hired every 360 days to exploit some loopholes. The system is mostly against them--very little rights or recourse, and fireable at any given moment. Bottom line: you will be overworked, jerked around, injured (probably), and frustrated time and time again. All things that are preventable if the place was managed half as well as it should be.