Wabtec reviews

Some of the "pros" traditionally offered by the company have shown signs of eroding in recent years. Three examples: (1) The company used to encourage imagination and innovation among technical employees by offering up to $5k for patent ideas; that has dropped to $1k. (2) The company used to encourage employees to accept foreign travel to distant customer locations (such as Australia, China, and South Africa) by offering business class travel or a cash bonus; that has been discontinued and employees must now travel (often 14+ hours!) only by coach. (3) Formal vacation and sick leave has been discontinued and replaced by a vague subjective system that is monitored and enforced by individual supervisors rather than by HR; this system is almost certainly not likely to work in the best interest of employees. "Penny wise, pound foolish" ideas are flourishing. Some examples: (1) Virtually all engineering resources are applied to making minor changes/improvements and bug fixes to decade-old designs; for many years, no resources have been dedicated to new product development. (2) Very little capital investment in engineering equipment has been made in the last decade or so. Most standard instrumentation (oscilloscopes, meters, power supplies, spectrum analyzers, etc.) is ten or twenty or more years old, and past key investments like the rack room are not being well managed and maintained. (3) The building no longer has a receptionist. Sure, it saves the cost of a salary, but the result is a first-impression of the company that is very unprofessional, unwecoming, and uncontrolled for all visitors, customers, and interviewees. (4) Employees who retire or resign are rarely replaced. Generally their responsibilities are distributed among the remaining engineers who already have full workloads. This is obviously not good for considerate of customers and not good for employee morale. The company is very consistently profitable, yet salaries generally fall below average for the DC metro area. Annually, senior management will verbally acknowledge the hard work, nights, weekends, above-and-beyond effort by all employees to achieve this level of profitability--all of which enables the company to offer regular generous bonuses for its senior managers. But never once has Wabtec shared their enormous profitability with the rank-and-file who make it possible-- no bonuses or other compensation for a job well done are available to anyone below VP (maybe director) level. This is a serious failure to recognize the fact that the company’s employees are their greatest resource and, ultimately, the source of all its success. Immediately after their brief annual verbal “thank you,” management gives employees a pat on the back and callously urges them to get right back to work. The company has established no consistent culture throughout its many divisions, and the nonstop acquisition of additional companies every year--especially the large scale merger/acquisitions of Faiveley and GE Transportation--continue to make this problem get worse. Any the few company-wide policies that are established are generally done only to disseminate tired, superficial slogans. "Customer Focus" is one such slogan that is unquestionably a noble goal. But it is posted without any sort of objective and verifiable procedure provided by management to implement--presumably it is up to the individual employee to interpret what “Customer Focus” means and to come up with their own idea about how to carry out this directive without any management guidance or oversight, no metrics to verify that it is being done in any particular fashion, and certainly no possibility of encouragement or reward for doing it well.

Poor communication, bad management, low pay