Pros
Management: Good people overall, they are handed a giant pile of worthlessness and expected to make diamonds, they do the best they can. The one downside is their complete inability to hold people accountable for fear of making waves or grievances by the union. Salaried employees: You can literally do nothing and instead of being held accountable by management, they just talk about how useless that person is but never do anything about it. By the time that person's uselessness reaches a tipping point, a new set of leadership comes in and the game starts all over again. So the benefit is, you can just coast, be a screw up and you are never in any real danger of losing your job, if you are in danger it takes a very, very long time to get rid of the person. If you give a single ounce of effort and have even the basic form of common sense, you are head and shoulders above your peers. Union employees: You can literally screw up customer product, schedule, costs and nothing ever happens to them because they hide behind their union card. GE is supposed to have this great workforce of skill and expertise, which may have been true at one point in history, but is a far distant memory at this point. So if you want to join a labor force that can literally walk around doing nothing on the customer's time and money and then screw up their product and not be held accountable, GE P&W is the place for you.
Cons
Management: Often times completely out of touch with the reality of what occurs where the work is actually being done. Accountability is merely a talking point, there is no accountability in this business. You will see executives destroy a business and get handed a new one. If you are in the "club", you are in the "club" forever. The common theme is to see who is riding whose coat tails up the GE ladder. It's a shameless game that is played. Salaried employees: The talent pool is on both sides of the extremes. You have great talent, and completely abysmal "Are you kidding me?" talent. They rely heavily on industry experience instead of hiring fresh, creative talent. They would rather hire the old industry experienced talent since they merely want caretakers instead of someone who wants to make things better. Either that, or they are just horrible at judging people during the hiring process. But in fairness, the salaried employees have to make the union people actually care which is a lost cause, I know I gave up trying... Union employees: The union labor force is horrible. They are the equivalent of grown children. They make nothing but excuses for everything, never hold themselves accountable, and don't even do great work. On top of that, a lot of them are very racist and aren't afraid to be open about it. I wondered how in the world did this group have so much power over GE when they are as smart as a box of rocks. They could easily be replaced by the next person on the street. It's blatantly obvious that GE is trying to eliminate the union with all the business closure of union specific businesses so you would think this would be a clue to the union leadership that they need to shape up, but their war cry is "I don't get paid to work any faster," so I guess they believe they are irreplaceable.