Work seven days a week with only one weekend off a month
Pros
Pros: Alcoa is a long standing leader in it's field with potentially global positions for salaried workers. Hourly is stuck at location. Alcoa is good at training new people for different positions and job tasks. The pay is good, not great or exceptional, but good.
Cons
Cons: Work schedule is horrible. Be prepared to surrender your life and soul. Work seven days straight and then they'll give you Tuesday and Wednesday off as your "weekend". Then wor another seven days straight. You can and will be forced to work 16 hour days. You will only get twelve real weekends off each year. They treat their lower management like slaves. They are encouraged to work twelve hour days and weekends, fired when they don't for "not having enough Alcoa spirit". Or just fired for nothing. I saw one guy fired for caring too much about an injured worker. Upper management dog-beats the frontline supervisors and that permeating despair rubs off on the hourly workers. You can't trust a company that eats it's own. Alcoa does not keep to it's promises. Company profits were up 30%, performance pay bonuses for the workers who broke production records dropped from 8% to 0.16%. Not encouraging at all. The tuition reimbursement they sell young people on? It's only available to ONLY the currently enlisted (no new people can be added to the program) and the budget is always "unknown". You will never get tuition money from Alcoa, they use it as a recruitment tactic, a bait, but it doesn't actually exist. Everyone is tired. I haven't seen my family in a long time. Vacation time is tiny. You'll be here for at least three years before you get two weeks off.