Michael Duggal

Not A Career - Dead End This is a family business. It's basically a dead-end job for any employees who aren't related to the owner in some way. No raises are given, at least none for non-execs or upper management. No bonuses are given, at least none for non-execs or upper management. PTO was minimal and had to be fought for. Paid holidays were those mandated by law, no more. Low moral exists at most levels. Extremely incompetent middle management. Rampant blame culture and culture of fear. (My manager once ordered an item built that was much larger than could fit in the provided space where it was to be installed, ignoring my explicit advice to build smaller. He then tried to pin the blame for his mistake on me. He cost the company tens of thousands of dollars for that mistake.) The company is disorganized in all ways and at all levels. There is clutter in hallways all around the building. Tons of waste and garbage is produced and there is no recycling, despite the company claiming to be "Green". The upper levels of company are either white or related to the owner. Severe nepotism exists at the upper levels. It seems as though all minorities, except those in the owner's family, are kept in low-level positions. Hopefully they have changed in the past few years, but when I first was hired, the company had a practice of hiring new people as "managers", so that the new hires would be salaried, rather than being paid at an hourly rate, despite the fact that they didn't manage anyone, other than themselves. This allowed our department to keep people at work from 9AM to 8PM without ever paying any overtime. People in my department regularly clocked 50-60 hours of work each week, but were only paid for 40 hours, which was written clearly on our paychecks. Most of the people who were hired at the same time that I was hired wisely quit within two months. After realizing that I wasn't being paid overtime, I stopped working over 40 hours, because I knew that I wouldn't ever be reimbursed for that time. This led my supervisor to attempt to find various excuses to "write me up" so that he could fire me. He was unsuccessful in doing so. There are many employees, some over 60 years of age, who are in low-paid positions and cannot afford the health insurance, yet constantly work overtime to stay on top of their living expenses with their meager wages. It was very sad to see. I will relate another experience that made me lose all hope in this company. The owner once called a mandatory meeting for all of the employees. In a ridiculous display, he made a teary-eyed speech, talked about God, and then gave bonus checks worth tens of thousands of dollars to each of a small handful of low-wage employees who hadn't received raises in many years. It was a pretty clever move by the owner for a number of reasons: 1. The people who received these bonuses had to pay taxes on their new windfall, which most likely bumped them up into a higher tax bracket. If they had just been given an incremental living-expense raise every year, they would have made much more money over that same period of time in which they never received a raise, and their tax burden that particular year would have been much less than it was with their one-time, lump-sum bonus. 2. After receiving their bonuses, those employees were still technically stuck at the same hourly rate that they had previously been before getting their bonuses, but were probably much less likely to ask for a raise after having been given such a large amount of cash. 3. Through this display, the owner was basically telling everyone in attendance that if they just kept their heads down and never asked for a raise (or complained about not receiving a bonus), they too *might* receive a similar large bonus themselves, in another 15 years or so of working with no raises.