1) PAY—While every company in our general industry in this area starts between $15--$21 per hour, Cree starts at $11.55. The starting pay has only gone up $0.55 an hour in a decade and a half. The management team constantly tells us in quarterly meetings how they “compare us to other companies in our industry in the area”, but they don’t.
2) HIRING TEMP TO PERMANENT—Most companies hire in 90 days or less, or straight out of the gate. Cree takes 6-9 months, or longer. The only reason that Cree does this is to avoid paying benefits for as long as possible, and to keep pay rates at a minimum.
3) THE CREE WAY—Cree has two sets of rules—one for the supervisor level on up, and one for the rest of us. There is no uniformity from top to bottom in the organization.
4) THEY INTENTIONALLY HARM PEOPLE—They have intentionally harmed me, not once but several times. Back, knees, shoulder, neck—all have been made worse or created due to them. Despite multiple doctor’s notes, x-rays, MRI’s and even disability paperwork, both supervisors and managers ignored everything and continued to send me back to the same areas that hurt me, and still do. I have needed multiple cortisone shots for these issues, and have been out of work 10 months out of the 3+ years I have worked there. They also fired a pregnant woman because she couldn’t do a job where she was on her feet for 12 hours a day.
5) CREE PLAYS FAVORITES—Different supervisors, even on the same shift, progress people through their level-up system at different rates, despite actual performance. One person might move someone up quickly who does nothing, while another leaves a hard worker at the bottom level. The same applies to evaluations, which are a joke. They are encouraged to mark people down in certain categories, to avoid giving them a paltry raise. Worse yet, they copy and paste the same comments from one employee’s evaluation to another! I have experienced a person putting their hands on me in a violent way, who has done the same to other employees before me, and they are still working there...while another person targeted by management for speaking up before was fired for a first offense.
6) THEY TARGET PEOPLE—Cree is very underhanded and vindictive. If you speak up in quarterly meetings, call them on their lies, question anything at all, you get a target painted on your back that never goes away. From that point on, they do one of two things, or both—either actively find ways to get rid of you, or spend their time making you so miserable that you quit.
7) THEY MAKE STUPID DECISIONS, THEN EXPECT LOW-LEVEL EMPLOYEES TO MAKE UP THE SLACK—They built a brand-new building that was supposed to be better-organized and more efficient than the disorganized mess we have now. However, they just sold part of their business to a German company, and part of the deal was the new building, which they never finished. So what was the point of building it? They never share any of the company’s profits with the employees. I heard before working here that Cree was one of the few companies with zero debt...now I know WHY. They froze their pay scales back in the late 90’s, took away every perk that made Cree worth working for, have constant turnover (most of which they themselves create), which keeps new people circulating in making the bare minimum pay scale and no benefits, keep equipment long past its usable life, never update anything, never replace anything that’s broken.
8) THEY ALWAYS RAISE DEMANDS WHILE STAGNATING PAY AND PERKS—Every time we hit a goal, no matter how high it already is, Cree raises it. EVERY TIME. We can never keep up, because they’re always demanding more while paying us the same amount. And their reward for hitting these goals? A box lunch or an extra 20 minutes for lunch once a quarter. If we’re really good, we get pizza. Not a pay raise, which would ACTUALLY be helpful.
9) THEY DON’T KNOW WHAT REAL INCENTIVES ARE—Their version of incentivizing employees is giving out movie gift cards (when 80% of the employees don’t even go to movies), having a box lunch once a quarter, giving us an extra 20 minutes at lunch once a quarter, or—the most common one—demanding more production.
10) CREE EVENTS ARE NOT DESIGNED FOR ALL EMPLOYEES—Cree has several annual events. Unfortunately, they are only designed for Mon-Fri employees, not the rest of us on 12-hour shifts. They don’t give us any extra time off, or shut down, so that we can go. Therefore, of the thousands of employees who show up, only a handful come from the nearly 1,000 employees who work in the Fab. This also goes for the cafeteria, which is only open limited hours during the day during the week (when there are more employees who work nights and weekends than don’t), the gym (which is available to salaried employees during their shift, but closes soon after the day shift leaves), and everything else.
11) THEY HAVE ZERO SYMPATHY—They act like your entire life should revolve around Cree. They don’t care about any circumstances going on in your life—marriage, kids, being sick or hurt, having surgery, nothing. They treat us like robots with no lives.
12) THEY PIGEONHOLE YOU INTO ONE AREA AND WON’T LET YOU OUT—Once you are assigned to an area, you are stuck there as long as you work at Cree. Any attempts to change areas is met with rebuffs, excuses, and lies.
13) PAY RAISES ARE MINIMAL OR NON-EXISTENT—I have been at Cree more than three years, and yet my pay hasn’t even gone up $1.00 an hour from the starting $11.55 rate. In a similar time frame, a good friend of mine—who works at a different company in the same general industry—started 4 months before I did at $15.50 per hour, and with regular decent raises and a change in position, she is now making over $19.00 an hour.
14) ALL POSITIONS ARE IDENTICAL TO THEM—I have never seen a company that pays everyone the exact same pay rate, no matter how easy or complicated the job is, no matter how dangerous it is, no matter how long it takes to learn. No matter what you do, you still start out at the same $11.55 an hour. I worked at another company years ago that did very similar work to what Cree does, and back then (1990’s), the people in the clean room made between $12 and $16 an hour...20 YEARS AGO. Cree doesn’t even pay that NOW, in 2016.
15) YOU CAN’T ADVANCE—One of the things they tell prospective employees, both in the interview and in orientation, is “There’s always room to move up at Cree”. What they don’t tell you is that unless you have either maintenance or technician experience or education, there is nowhere “up” for you to go. Every job outside of those two in the Fab pays the same amount, and they won’t let you leave.
16) ATTRITION RATE IS HORRENDOUS—I have watched hundreds of employees go out the door in my short time at Cree. Many quit in frustration. Others were fired, mostly for stupid offenses that other companies wouldn’t even bother with. I watched over 100 people go out the door in 6 months to the same competing company because their starting pay rates were between $15-$18 per hour. You would think that all of these qualified operators going out the door would wake Cree up to the fact that they’re not treating their employees right, but they don’t even blink an eye.
17) THEY HAVE AN UNDESERVED REPUTATION—Cree built a reputation back when they first started of being one of the best places in the Triangle to work for. However, they got complacent, and as they got larger, they completely lost touch with the lower levels. Now, they don’t even pretend to care what goes on outside of their ivory towers. Many new people who don’t know what Cree is like get excited when they hear about Cree, because they think they’re the same company that their reputation from 20 years ago suggests, but they’re not. Second, because of that unearned reputation, Cree has a ton of people lined up waiting to get in the door, so they don’t care about losing good operators. It’s a win-win for them, because they get rid of people who might question them or raise concerns, and replace them with new people who don’t know any better, and get paid less, and who are still temps that they don’t have to give benefits to.
18) THEY IGNORE ALL EMPLOYEE CONCERNS—At every quarterly meeting, all concerns are brushed under the rug without a second’s hesitation. It got so bad that two employees tried advocating for a union. Prior to that, we were working double mandatory overtime, pay was stagnant and had been for years, and employees were being treated like slaves. All of a sudden, the overtime is canceled, and they form a “S.W.A.T. Team”, to address employee concerns (Pay was #1 by a mile). It was a puppet group, controlled by the higher-ups. Their list had Pay at #4. Then they listed the 4 concerns they were going to work on, and Pay had mysteriously disappeared off the list.
19) H.R. IS A MANAGEMENT PUPPET GROUP—Even when you manage to find a person there who shares your concerns, their recommendations or directives are overruled by managers, who are technically supposed to be under their control.
Overall, Cree is by far the worst job that I have ever had in my life, and this is after nearly 3 decades in the workforce and nearly 4 dozen different permanent and temporary jobs. The only employees not actively trying to get away from them are either new people who don’t know better yet, or employees who have been there long enough to be making a decent wage and don’t want to lose it. I only know a handful of people out of nearly 1,000 who actually like working there.
