Pros
Great benefits, likely one of the best in the state Calpers - pension/health retirement benefits strict 8am-5pm M-F work Unionized and protected jobs Vesting at 10 years Fun environment and energy with the students and events, especially during graduation Boss/chair/dean/management usually change pretty quickly (3-10 years), if your boss sucks you have a 50/50 to hope for a better one in a few years. With vesting at 10 years, you likely will get another chance at a new manager by then. If you stay long enough and start early enough, you might be able to get 100% pension of what you retire at.
Cons
Most are treated as just a warm, replaceable, body at a desk Usually low pay Unionized - because of being treated like another number and not recognized for work, many become jaded and do bare minimum on jobs. They will likely be like this until retirement. Low morale with many workers on campus Management gets raises every single year and usually don't know what people even do, staff members who do the actual jobs never get a raise unless given by the union through contract negotiations. Fake façade of diversity/equity/inclusion/insert buzz word here. Honestly, this place runs off of favoritism/who you know and not by merit/work ethic/years of experience/etc. Hired an older white male with no experience on campus for top tier pay because he was married to a former dean, counterparts who do same work paid way less, analysts above this position paid the same or LESS than this individual. This is one of many stories on campus. No real training for jobs when hired and many staff members (again because of being jaded) do not want to assist new people on campus. Typical responses I've heard are "No one helped me when I first came on and I'm not either", "I don't get paid enough to do that". Boss/chair/dean/management usually change pretty quickly (3-10 years), if your boss sucks you have a 50/50 to hope for a better one in a few years. You might get a worse one too. If you are not a go-getter it will be hard for you to succeed since training is hard to come by and usually it is hard for people to figure out what their job even is because managers also don't know and definitely don't know how to train them. Very hard to get a raise without the union, most people need to move positions to get more money on campus and even then it's usually the bare minimum offered. Yearly evaluations are rated at a 1-5 type category with 3 being "satisfactory". All management has been told that satisfactory means you are doing everything exactly as you should and have been told not to rate staff higher than that category, if they do they need to provide more information and fill out more paperwork as to why you are giving higher than a 3. This is because if you hit an overall category of 5 you can request a raise yourself and HR cannot deny the request; but it doesn't explain why management can't give a 4 because although you can initiate a raise request with an overall 4 rating, HR can deny those. This is another reason for low morale in the last few years since this change.
