Pros
Honestly, all of the pros are not good things. - Nepotism is rampant so if you know someone high up it's easy to get a good position with little experience, but you probably wont care for this review if that's the case. - If you work for the company for a long time and schmooze the higher ups, you can get a good position with NO experience, and you will never be reprimanded or removed from that position unless you become a legal liability for the company, so that's probably nice if you're a terrible person. - Most people who can will keep to themselves to avoid extra work or getting involved with others who might get them fired, so if you can manage to do that in your position, you can get away with goldbricking quite a bit (or rather, ironbricking because you'll be making next to nothing, most likely).
Cons
Oh boy. Where do I start? - Management is completely unaccountable. They all have a real "Do as I say, not as I do" and "Listen to me, or else" kind of mindset. They act like infallible god-kings every time they receive any kind of pushback. When their decisions backfire, don't you dare even accidentally remind them that you warned them or you'll get a demotion and it'll get blamed on you. Every single thing I mention from this point forward will also be something that has been brought to management's attention at some point and has either been ignored or resulted in whoever brought it up getting fired. - Terrible pay EVERYWHERE in the company. Unless you're in a really high up management position, expect to make half of less than what other people in your profession make, even if you work for the company for a long time. I was originally told my salary would AT LEAST raise with the minimum wage increases, if not more. They did this once and then never again, and the minimum wage caught up with my hourly rate (which was already barely livable). In the four years that I had my last position as a designer, I got about two more dollars an hour, most of which came from state-mandated minimum wage increases (and this is despite having significantly more responsibility than when I started). - The benefits (healthcare, time off, etc.) are ABYSMAL. On top of that, U-Haul has a "smokers tax" and an "overweight tax". That's right. If you're overweight or smoke, you will get money deducted from your paycheck (otherwise, you would need to get proof from a doctor that you did not smoke and were not overweight). While I was never affected by this, I know people who were, and iirc it netted them somewhere in the range of $50-200 a year. Surely, if they would have such an intense tax, they must have some good programs to help with weight loss and quitting nicotine, right? Of course not! They put a (mildly, but expensive) healthy cafe in the HQ and replaced all of the food in the vending machines with (mildly) healthy food. That's about it, though. Good luck eating healthy or reducing your stress without nicotine when you're making pennies, by the way. - Included in benefits is the 401k. Company-matching on contributions is basically non-existent, but maybe I just couldn't really tell because I made so little money I could barely contribute to my 401k, anyways. After working for the company for a few years, they'll give you some employee stock which, can potentially be valuable after working there for a long time, but is obviously completely variable on if the company does well, and if it doesn't, well, there goes a chunk of your retirement. - Wow, what a terrible workplace culture. If you're still on the fence after everything I just said, well remarkably, the workplace culture might be the worst part. Upper management is very openly hyper-conservative, and this is pervasive in every corner of the company. Good people are severed from the workplace for sticking up for themselves, their coworkers, or their departments. They spend a remarkable amount of money on union-busting (gee, I wonder why?) The only thing they spend more money on is their top-of-the-line legal team, which is desperately needed for the huge backlog of lawsuits they experience from both customers, employees, and watchdogs/government agencies. Anyways, some of the only high-quality educational courses they have are on why you shouldn't join a union, they have people on payroll dedicated to union-busting (that you see frequently and are well known), and they value snitching on people who even TALK about MAYBE trying to start a union. The word "union" is more reviled than actual slurs. Speaking of slurs, depending on where you work, you might hear them! Lot's of good ol' boys that like to make jokes about how many of our mechanics are Hispanic. If you work around the mechanics themselves, don't be surprised if you hear jokes involving a particular t-word (as you see, transmissions on a car are sometimes referred to in a similar manner, and while this is the same joke no matter how you phrase it, I heard it many times over many years). As you may imagine, there are MANY closeted LGBTQ members at this company. Going back to how race is handled here, just briefly, I'd also like to include the occasional company-wide video messages Joe Schoen likes to send out, where he spends much time talking about how he is *super not racist* because he has a black wife and mixed children, and how occasionally U-Haul will build locations in low-income communities (which may sound altruistic at face value, but in reality poor people tend to move more frequently for many reasons, so it just makes U-Haul more money). On the topic of Joe Schoen, he also likes to send out a company wide e-mail every Christmas reminding everyone that "Jesus is the reason for the season", and that even if you're non-Christian, Jesus still exists in the scripture of other Abrahamic religions, so you should still be able to appreciate it. One of the few good things this company does is pool together a bunch of donations (monetary and material) every Christmas for one lucky employee with financial hardship, but this act of generosity doesn't amount to much when the donations are mostly out of the pockets of employees and not the company itself, and when you realize that said employee would not be experiencing financial hardship if they were paid what they deserved for their level of experience and contributions to the company. - It might not even be worth it to mention because it was probably assumed, but the work/life balance is also terrible, or at least extremely inconsistent. Again, if you keep to yourself and just do your job without aiming for anything higher, most likely not much will be expected of you and you can spend a lot of company time building out your resume, applying for better jobs, or pursuing hobbies and other interests. If you're gunning for a management position, though, be prepared to swear fealty and get used and abused by anyone that's even a step above you. You'll maybe tell yourself that this is what's required to prove that you have what it takes to be in management, until that position you were aiming for becomes available and some person from a completely different part of the company you've never heard of got the position because he goes golfing regularly with the guy who's hiring. I have seen this happen with, quite literally, every single change in upper management that I've personally experienced. - Also as a fun side note, it took the company almost six months after COVID started to let everyone work from home. While we were waiting to be allowed to work from home, management did everything in their power to keep it quiet when someone went home with (or died from) COVID. They would only inform the people that worked closely with them, not considering anyone else that those people could have possibly communicated with or where they went in the offices during their work day. I would occasionally hear coughing on the other side of the floor I worked on, and once someone even whispered to me that that person tested positive for COVID and was sent home. Despite sharing the same break rooms, bathrooms, and general vicinity with this person, I was never informed by management. As you can imagine, Joe Schoen was extremely eager to get everyone back into office as soon as he was legally allowed to (his reasoning: some people HAVE to work in-office because their job is not possible to do remotely, so it's not fair to them if everyone else gets to work from home). By the way, this was not due to there not being work-from-home infrastructure at the company before the pandemic. In fact, the company already had very good work-from-home infrastructure and even let some people in corporate do it before the pandemic. Many people who were able to work from home before the pandemic were no longer allowed to after everyone was forced to return to the office. That decision feels a little... Ideological. Especially when Joe Schoen occasionally shows up as a guest on Fox News. - I have many other fun little tidbits, like how the company laid off a bunch of people after COVID even though they didn't need to and then claimed government money for it, or how people commonly say "the U-Haul ninjas got them" whenever someone is fired within the hour of publicly speaking out against the company. I'm going to try to avoid getting disappeared in the middle of the night, though. In the end, I only worked at this company for as long as I did because I grew up too poor to afford college (even community college was a financial struggle) and this was basically the only opportunity I had. The second I had enough experience under my belt to confidently move to another company, I did, and my new coworkers sometimes jokingly (and lovingly) refer to me as a wounded puppy because of some of the weird habits and workplace values I inherited from U-Haul. In my opinion, the little negative things U-Haul left me with are a bit like tumors, and making a move to a better company a bit like much needed chemotherapy.
