The company expects salaried employees to work overtime without pay, but this is not disclosed during the hiring process. On the other hand, contract and hourly paid employees are kept to the 40 hour week with overtime kept to a minimum. It is a very lopsided arrangement with the salaried employees taking home less per hour, as well as, creating a disproportionate work/life balance.
New hires are paid more than present employees for doing the same job. Pay increases are kept to a minimum for most, so the pay scale for existing employees never catches up to the new hires. The longer you stay, the wider the financial gap between you and the new recruits.
Nepotism abounds at Thomson. Only a select few are recognized or rewarded for their achievements. Many of these people get recognized for the same work other people do; however they are favored by management, so they receive the recognition while the others go unnoticed. These same management favored people also get promoted into management positions.
Those who get promoted are not necessarily the best qualified. Some managers (not all) lack management skills but brown nose their way up the ladder. Some use mental abuse tactics to keep the employees in line by eroding their self esteem. In addition, it is hard to remove these managers because upper management sometimes blames the subordinate employees for the shortcoming of the manager. Also, some employees are allowed to bump themselves up more than one level in the organization while others are told they cannot.
Be careful what job you enter into the company with. Many of the positions will leave you with no outside marketable skills because a lot of the skills you acquire on the job are Thomson Reuters proprietary skills. When employees hire in management tells them that there are many opportunities for lateral and upward moves; however changing job types within the organization are virtually non existent. You quickly become directly associated with the title and job you start with.
As for advancement opportunities, you are allowed to try out for any position within the organization; however your efforts are often futile because the hiring decisions are often made before the interview process. Sometimes you get lucky and over come the odds but that is not the norm.
