Pros
- Decent pay
- Plenty of overtime if you want it
- Plant is mostly automated so you'll spend a lot of days warming up your chair in the shop for 12 hours
- Healthy mix of new and old equipment, plenty of learning opportunities
- Recession proof job
Cons
- Inexperienced management, literal teenagers running the show some days
- Corporate mindset here is a joke. They'll get all riled up about downtime when something breaks, and then forget it ever happened two weeks later when the next fire shows up
- Union is a joke. Dues are based on percentage of pay, electricians make top dollar in the plant so we contribute more than anyone else, yet we get zero representation
- Did I mention the corporate nonsense? Their latest genius idea is called "Autonomous Teams". Basically just a way to appeal to the lowest common denominator with what should be common sense
- Pay is actually low compared to the duties and responsibilities you're expected to have here. Industrial electrician, plc tech, maintenance planner, all rolled into one.
- You will get called nonstop some days because nobody outside of the electric shop is held to any sort of standard. They'll look at you with a straight face and expect you to troubleshoot their machine for them.
- Shift work gets pretty old. 12 hr days, back and forth between nights and days every month.
- Retention sucks and the plant is almost always short staffed, so the forced overtime gets old as well
- We never have parts to fix anything because our storerooms are controlled by people at the corporate office up in st louis, instead of someone at the plant that actually knows what's going on