The Hunger Games? - Team Member Rivian Employee Review

Let’s start with their employee parking lots. They have several, but none very big that are near the plant. Any spaces closer to the plant are reserved for management and office workers. Parking is typically highly competitive. If all the spaces are filled, you have to drive to their perpetually temporary spillover lot and take a bus in. It’s like going to the airport - plan on arriving two hours early. End of shift is just as much fun, standing outside in freezing January or sweltering July waiting your turn to squeeze through one of two turnstiles along with hundreds of your co-workers. To boot, heavy truck traffic has torn up College Avenue so bad, you feel as if you’re driving in a war-torn country. Did I mention it can be nearly a mile walk just to get in? On to the (mis)management. Most of them never worked in manufacturing. Perhaps trying to project a cool California vibe, Rivian hired mostly younger Tesla rejects and Taco Bell assistant managers to run the place. You’re never really sure who’s in charge or who can boss you around. They do NOT have an HR dept. they have “People Partners” whose sole function appears to be firing employees for everything other than blatant drug abuse. It’s okay to sell drugs or get high at break times - or whenever you can sneak some vaping in one of the restrooms. Three of the Group Leads I’ve worked under were fired for sexual harassment. Can’t blame the GL’s too much though as some are basically right out of high school, and Rivian’s onboarding doesn’t include sexual harassment training. They have a ton of “required” online courses they don’t give you any time to take. Instead, they try to scare you into doing them on your own time by notifying you this or that needs to be completed by a certain date. Quite a diverse workforce. You either have a very hard job or a very easy one, all depending on whether you’re buddies with your GL. A lot of the workforce have bs medical restrictions, so if you’re healthy and honest, you’ll be doing all their hard work as they flirt, text and play on their smartphones all day. At 61, I do a lot more work than my 20-something team members. Rivian changes their shift times, schedules and policies whenever it suits them. They constantly tout work/life balance, but it’s just a recruitment tool. They only care about making up for the shortcomings of management. It’s not a very safe environment. Fork lifts, golf carts, etc. have right-of-way, and there are hundreds of them buzzing around at top speed - honking, cussing and berating you for not using some convoluted pedestrian pathway that adds 250 steps in your long, arduous quest for an available restroom. Tripping hazards everywhere - even on the assembly lines. Their ergonomics people won’t do a darn thing to make your job less strenuous; apparently just having an ergonomics team is enough to make us think they care. Rivian’s latest re-tooling has created an excess of team members. The company if firing people as much as it can. Team members are on eggshells as a vast army of foreign engineers speaking broken English and laptop-toting geeks videotape your line for weeks with the sole purpose of eliminating jobs and distributing the work. Bottom line, You’d probably feel safer and better treated at a Vietnamese Nike factory. We have been promised raises for over a year now. Rivian’s managed to weasel a billion or so from the state of Illinois, another $1-5 billion from VW, and our founder has a net worth in the billions - but, hey the rest of us need to economize. Terrible company to work for