ROSCOE — Two weeks of pay for every year on the job up to 52 weeks was the severance package Chemtool employees were expecting after the company's Rockton plant was destroyed by fire.Taylor Vronch, a Chemtool foreman, called the severance package a "generous policy," that is before the company changed it.Vronch was among 25 Chemtool employees who gathered Sunday at Mary's Market in Roscoe to talk about a recent change to the severance packages they say they were assured they'd get.The package now states employees with five years or more will receive one weeks' pay per year on the job with a maximum payout of eight weeks.
Gee, two months severance for a surprise shutdown of a plant seems pretty darn crummy to me. (What is it about Berkshire Hathaway companies and pay? I feel like I hear a fair number of complaints about them, but I think that's confirmation bias on my part.)
I've worked for publicly traded companies, founder/family owned companies, and private equity owned companies in my career. Of the three kinds, I would be wary of joining another private equity company in the future. They tend to be laser-focused on the goal of holding a business for five years and flipping it for a profit. Things like severance pay, benefits, employee development, and R&D that are more of a long-term than short-term benefit to a company are not important to private equity owners. So what if the remaining employees are less loyal after seeing how the folks at the Rockford plant were treated? It'll be someone else's problem in a couple of years.
ReplyDeleteThat doesn't tend to be the style of Berkshire Hathaway, i.e. they tend to buy-and-keep for the long run. But the low pay seems to be organization-wide, I feel.
DeleteThis is opposite of the people I know who got hired/work at Lubrizol in the Cleveland area (I do not know anyone else at any of the other Berkshire companies). Almost everyone I know got extremely generous relocation and sign on bonuses, 85k was the minimum salary of the folks I know (most were fresh chemistry PhDs grads and some were mid-career folks with masters and PhDs), and pretty good 401k match iirc, and of course benefits across the board. Granted, the last time I heard of people going there was maybe around 2015 and I'd say a minimum salary of 85k in the Cleveland area is pretty good as a younger person.
ReplyDeleteI know people in the Rockford area where this Chemtool location is and that whole area has severely depressed wages in my opinion. I am not at all surprised to see them being taken for fools. I hope someone had this original severance in writing and can get litigious on the Berkshire folks.
Thanks! The chemists I've interacted with at Lubrizol seem happy, so that's a good thing. Hard to know what this severance package thing is about, but it certainly seems unkind to me.
DeleteI worked with a PhD chemist who was poached by Lubrizol, and they had to pay him well and give him a generous relocation package to lure him to move his family from an East Coast city to Cleveland. I suspect that plant floor workers in a Rust Belt town like Rockford are not treated nearly as generously, and that the Chemtool plant was probably just a production facility with Lubrizol management and R&D sitting in Cleveland.
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