Pros
I loved the St. Louis branch lab. Everyone there was wonderful and I learned a lot.
Cons
No support from corporate. I left because after 3 years I couldn't afford to work there. We made much less than the average for these positions and the company made it clear that they did not care about us. We had high expectations that we were not equipped to pull off. Cheap, outdated and often broken equipment was used regularly. When the pandemic started, our workload did not change, but our staff was slashed in half. 3 of our 6 analysts were laid off. The other 3 of us had to manage our regular workload with half the staff and we were constantly reminded not to take overtime, which led to the one salaried worker working up to 80 hours a week and the other two of us wishing we could help more. We could not take any days off because we wouldn't have enough people to run the lab, but HR was sending reminders to use PTO or we would lose it. They did not reimburse us for unused PTO. We would come home at the end of the day and not have energy to make dinner. We were utterly exhausted and corporate did not care. Many of them were working from home. It was one of the most stressful situations I've been put in, and we were making like $17/HR. Our big thank you for all this? A box of inedible granola bars, a tube of chapstick, and an essential oil from an MLM.
