Pros
For the most part, job security is good. Benefits are good, but not what they were 10 years ago. Pay is very good, at least in the plants. The people I work with are great.
Cons
Predatory attendance policy, especially for shift workers. If you miss 3 days in a year, a fourth gets you a letter. Each time you are off after that, you get another letter. They stay in your file for 9-12 months, if you get to the 4th, you're out. Senior Management cuts repair and outage budgets to the bone, even on equipment that is well past "end of life". Most of our tradespeople are within 10 years of retirement, and we have half the number of journeymen we had 10 years ago. Even when we get the money and parts to fix something, we no longer have enough people to get it fixed in a timely manner. Senior Management awards themselves huge bonuses, stock awards, and pay increases, while the message they send us is that we should do more with less. They built a multi million dollar reflecting pool at the 3 office buildings they have downtown, now known as 1 Energy Plaza, formerly 2000 2nd Ave, Detroit, MI. At the same time, they discontinued the profit sharing for represented employees, the ones that make the power, and get it to our customers, and cut a periodic outage on a generating unit back 80% on time and money. Upper mismanagement are looting the company, and inventing executive jobs for their friends. The only concern downtown is what did the stock price do today, and how much money did we make.