Pace, The Wretched Place - Lab Analyst I Pace Analytical Employee Review

Pace bought out my lab in Grand Rapids, MI. We were told that it'd be mutually beneficial: Pace would have a MI lab, and we would have a more stable workflow and money to improve the labs. To my dismay, things got worse. The extent? Roughly two years after the buyout, the GR lab was downsized to a service center, laying off many people. How did Pace tick me off? Let me count the ways. 1. Promised upgrades were put off indefinitely. OEXT people were manually shaking their funnels a year and a half after the buyout, and when the spring rush hit, they drowned in the workload and missed several deadlines, so customers were lost. LIMS changeover was considered a greater priority than reducing overtime wages through better equipment. 2. Equipment was bought reluctantly and usually used (because hey, cheaper), but savings were offset by expensive service calls (microwave extraction for soils). 3. The workload varied wildly during the year, with rushes (~60/week) in spring and fall and huge slowdowns in summer and winter. There were no furlough options in slow times. 4. Staffing was not always enough (see above). OEXT needed two or three more people to keep up with the workload in a rush but never got the help. The former OEXT manager gave three weeks' notice in January, but no one was brought in until during the mid-March rush. Management griped about overtime paid out but never hired people to work at a non-overtime wage to deal with it. One person, in fact, was fired during the spring rush, when OEXT needed help with something so simple as washing glassware. Three other people were fired that year and not replaced, leading to a “who's next?” feeling. Morale just kept dropping in 2018 with this turnover. 5. Local management was brought on in 2017 from a lab bought in Kalamazoo and did a horrible job. They played favorites, bringing on some of the workers from Kalamazoo, even if there was not enough work to justify it. We were micromanaged. One thing added was a daily checklist of lab chores, like dumping the glass waste and wiping counters, which we were supposed to do and initial. It was unnecessary and a real pain in busy times. Despite the mistrusting micromanagement, these people still seemed to have no idea was going on and would not listen to our pleas for equipment,help, or to turn down work because it showed a “can't do, won't try attitude.” I understand one of these people is now in management at the Ormond Beach location. Sorry about that. You deserve better. 6. Lab grunts get all the blame for stuff going wrong, while management does nothing to help and seldom gets such eyeballing for its lack of support. Management seemed to promote quantity over quality but still expect quality work. 7. People who have been there longer are not always tapped for leadership, but outsiders are brought in (but seldom heeded). 8. I was there for the buyout, but some people brought on after me were paid more and given higher titles despite having equivalent or less experience. I asked for a promotion and raise, citing how I had done all that was asked of me and provided a service no one else in the network did, a and was told that I didn't get it because the other people came from another environmental lab, and I was from a different background. I just needed to work longer to earn that promotion/raise, like 15 years. Hog.Wash. 9. Pay is wretched. I don't know if they start people at $12/hour or a little more, but they are stingy, giving raises once a year. It's hard to live independently on this pay. This needs to change immediately. I was not making $16/hour when I left, and I did all that was asked of me and even tried to learn about my job and the compounds I worked with. One of the higher-ups complained about people saying that they should instead ask what they can do to earn more. Yo, dude: Many general labor jobs start at around the same pay and require only a high school degree. Our attitude isn't to fault. A tree service starts its people at $17 an hour for ground work. 10. We found out we could get the same extraction done with less time and fewer materials than EPA requirements but had to change back to inefficient methods so we wouldn't incur ire. There was still an expectation of doing a ton of work fast despite this. As you would expect, quality suffered. 11. There were plenty of hazardous materials floating through the labs (PCBs, mercury, dichloromethane, etc.), but effective ventilation measures were never put in place to protect workers. OEXT kept retesting air quality despite tests always showing too-high levels of dichloromethane, rather than being able to upgrade the air system. This air was vented into the wetland across the path from the building. They did not care about the EPA or OSHA in this way. The only safety measures put in place were low-level ones, like removing razors from the labs and restricting where lab coats could be worn. 12. We had many hour-long meetings that could have been completed in ten minutes or downgraded to an email. We often had meetings to discuss how behind we were with this glut of samples during a rush, putting us even more behind. 13. Crosstraining? What's that? 14. Training? You mean we shouldn't just throw the new hire into the thick of things without and IDC? 15. Throwing away mounds of glass and plastic daily. That does not live up to the company motto of “Working together to improve our health and environment.” 16. This most education that should be required for working here is an associate's degree, and that would be for VOCs and SVOCs. Everything else is high-school level and pays like it, a large disrespect to those with a B.S. 17. Work is monotonous and repetitive, not stimulating at all. 18. PTO accumulates slowly.