Pros
High rate of pay, good benefits package
Cons
Huge service area and not enough technicians required a lot of overtime and little personal time off. Weekend call duty rotated quickley. Had promised additional training from factories and in refrigeration, but failed to provide it, after being hired I was told I had to find the time and pay for it myself and if I passed they would reimburse me, ( not what I was promised at hiring ). This was used to lower my skill level ratings. Had said at time of hire that productivity ratings used for personnel performance reviews and thus pay rates and advancement opportunities would be calculated in a manner different than was in practice. Manditory meetings, saftey training or product update training time was not excluded from productivity mearsurments and impacted a technician negatively. Paperwork, procedures, customer service policies and reporting was constantly being changed and usually this required more detail and took more time, impacting performance figures negatively. Managers allowed personal feelings to interfer with professional decisions about assignments and advancement. I am aware of two instances of overt discrimination, one racial and one agism from which cases were filed with EEOC. Both were setteled out of court with the agism complaintant finding employment elsewhere and the racism plantiff acepting a lucrative severance package and early retirement. It was discovered that state law required compensation for on-call time even if no service was provided. GCS did not pay for stand-by time, only for time on t=a call, and did not retroactively pay the standby time they had not paid up to when it was discovered theyed owed it to technicians. After 18 months they did start to pay standby time when threatened by the state. When I was hired they promised to pay all costs for relocation about 1200 miles away, but they only paid for a truck rental, a portion of the fuel, none of the insurance, storage space, hotel or food costs, and considered it income so taxes were deducted from the payment originally quoated. They also did it as a reimbursement after I got to the new location instead of the promised up-front payment. A few years ago Ecolab, parent company of GCS was bought out by a multinational company and re-organized. The names were kept and most of the management and lower level personnel, but I am not certain how it has affected any of the above problems. There is not a lot of room for advancement. You have to wait for someone to retire, die or go to some other company to see any significant increase in status or pay. I can not recommend working for GCS even though the compensation was good, you DO have to earn it in putting up with some unessisary crap, be sure to get everything in writting before accepting a position, and if it's not in writting expect any promises to not be kept. Read carefully, because what you were told in person or over the phone may not be what is in the contract. A handshake is not sufficient for this company.