I cannot promise either a generous or paltry wage, because it’s a lottery. Some technicians come with no experience, no degree, and no enthusiasm but are paid charitably. More qualified people with the same job title are compensated little more than supermarket cashiers.
The nature of food safety makes laboratory hours inherently variable. After-work plans will be displaced by surprise seventeen hour shifts. On rare occasions, you may finish early; more commonly, you will work from 2:00pm to 8:00am and be scheduled to resume working later that morning. This is exacerbated by the fact that management is chronically incapable of allocating the appropriate amount of labor for a given workload.
Management has notoriously little knowledge of the time it takes to perform the work. A workload that might take the fastest technicians 14 hours will be allotted just 8 hours. If the deadline is missed, management does not revise the goal; they assume the technicians were unmotivated. Evidence that the laboratory is understaffed is dismissed by management's confirmation bias and ardent refusal to ever interface with reality. It’s not enough for you alone to meet their unrealistic goals, however, because only collective productivity is monitored. If one technician is especially slow, the entire department will be chastised. To avoid trouble, some technicians work off the clock to hide their hours, but that way madness lies! Like a perpetually rising Soviet production quota, if managements’ unworkable visions ever seem realized, you will watch their subsequent expectations crawl into the stratosphere.
Quality is at constant odds with production goals. Hours of quality control steps can be secretively forged, and the process still isn’t fast enough for management. Yes, quality standards are as elastic as your shift. A supervisor might tell you to forgo a mandatory quality procedure in order to save time; that same supervisor will write you up for it the next day to cover their own infraction. Equipment essential to ensuring accuracy can remain broken for months without being replaced. For ten months of every year, little attention was paid to ensuring our results were valid; the remaining months fell on either side of a major audit.
The company maintains a constant and ambient measure of shadiness. What shenanigans are not merely unethical are entirely illegal. Supervisors have preferred to forge legally consequential results rather than report bad test runs to impatient clients, and in 2014, four technicians filed a collective action lawsuit against Food Safety Net Services for failing to pay them the overtime the law required. I suppose that if the plaintiffs wanted to be paid more, they could have bought the illegal raffle tickets the company sells to its employees for a chance to win a raise or cash prize (See Texas Charitable Raffle Enabling Act Sec. 2002.056 - a).
There is no prospect for equal treatment in the laboratories. Managers harbor petulant grudges and nurse pets. Supervisors have sex with junior employees and collect their undergarments. A manager will write up one employee for an infraction but give another the gentlest verbal warning for the same violation. A technician will spend years asking for a position they were immaculately qualified for and promised only to witness that position repeatedly filled by the less qualified friends and family of nepotistic supervisors.
Discipline is dispensed as consistently here as in a failing banana republic: collective punishments, favoritism, bosses forcing you to dig your own grave. There’s no telling who will be punished for what in this Escherian stairwell of accountability, but it’s usually at the conclusion of a protracted game of hot potato. No one wants to be the last person with their hand on a mistake, because they receive full responsibility for the mistake while whoever perpetrated it is only punished if it's politically popular. So bad is the constant need to defer blame, a technician often took pictures of his work as proof of having done it correctly. Lead technicians are held fully responsible for the motivation and performance of more junior technicians while being given no levers with which to affect them. Meanwhile, supervisors and managers will bully you, belittle and curse at you. Complaints against them are at best ineffectual and at worst a declaration of your resignation.
If this review has aroused suspicions about the company, don’t let those be placated by promises during the hiring process. Managers will offer whatever hours or department you want, but those overtures become forgotten or postponed into perpetuity within weeks of hiring. People are moved to positions with radically different responsibilities, schedules and pay than they agreed to and are lucky if they were told with any advanced notice; they certainly weren’t asked. The most employed tactic is to gradually reveal that a temporary deviation from a prior agreement has become permanent. Don't let your suspicions be dismissed by current technicians either. They are actively censored by supervisors so that no new employees are given a negative impression of the company until it's too late.
Either the CEO or the Director of Human Resources may follow this review with platitudes about being committed to improving the company. I believe their sentiments are sincere and commendable, but it’s small consolation. Whatever they’ve been doing to improve employee satisfaction has been failing for years. The average company on Glassdoor has a rating of 3.3. At the time of writing, Food Safety Net Services has an overall Glassdoor rating of 2.4. Some locations have a rating of less than 2. Most people in the laboratories are explicitly unhappy with their job and many are plainly trying to leave. An open door policy won’t change that when most of the peons aren’t in regular contact with the CEO. It’s the managers and supervisors that we interface with, and there’s not enough trust between the managers and the technicians to fill a whirl-pak bag.
