Six years ago, a respcted CEO left and a new guy took over. He had broad support then. He filled up the other leadership positions with shills from the oil and gas industry, overlooking internal candidates who had been groomed for advancement for years. Those passed by left the firm, often taking top talent with them.
The senior leadership made a choice to only go after very big projects, and started focusing too many resources in the Oil and Gas Industry. This happened at the expense of long-standing local relationships, and ultimately had a negative impact on the company's bottom line. Furthermore, the smaller projects are no longer here to serve as a training ground for junior level staff. Instead of becoming better engineers, they are often pigeonholed into drudgerous, repetitive tech work for months and even years.
Revenues continue to decline, and the company has been through several rounds of layoffs, sometimes axing engineers who had spent their entire career with Kleinfelder and were nearing retirement. These firings took a tremendous emotional toll on the remaining workstaff, and morale continues to decline.
And profits are still declining. As the company scrambles to keep the privately stock value from tanking, they have applied a classic Republican approach-- balancing the budget in the backs of the poor. First, they eliminated straight time pay for overtime hours, which largely affected junior level staff-- the people who are compensated least and work the longest hours. The overtime hours were something the California employees relied on to maintain an adequate standard of living, and this change left some employees too broke to even pay rent. Leadership promised to replace pay with bonuses and and paid time off, but this has been implemented very haphazardly, and places undue burdon on project manager supervisors who are already buried in paperwork.
Next the health care packages shrunk and will continue to shrink. As of 2016, everyone will be using the high deductible health savings style insurance. It's not hard to find engineering firms who pay better, do more interesting work and have sweeter benefits packages.
Kleinfelder is simply becoming a less lucrative, career building place to work. It's quite sad, really.
