Pros
1) Home every night. Other drivers in my location have had to stay in a hotel once or twice in the 4 years I have been working at Sunstate Equipment Co.(hereafter referred to as SSE) . However, I personally have not, although I have been in as early as 03:00 and stayed as late as 22:00. 2) Assigned vehicles, at least at my branch, and they're normally not too old or in disrepair. SSE used to trade replace delivery vehicles around the 250k mile mark, though that has crept up to around 300k - 350k miles which means you can still end up with a 5 year old truck if it hasn't met the mileage quota. 3) Free (or heavily discounted) use of equipment for personal projects. Need a backhoe to dig a long trench in your yard? Maybe a Ditch Witch for a smaller trench for some sprinkler lines? SSE has you covered. 4) Vision and dental benefits are decent and you can accrue a fair amount of PTO (paid time off). All major holidays are paid and for Thanksgiving, we get a 4-day weekend with Thursday and Friday being paid.
Cons
1) Hours vary - a lot! This is mostly a seasonal variance, so in the winter it's not as much of an issue since people don't normally pour concrete, frame buildings, or dig frozen soil in the pre-dawn hours during the dead of winter, but you will be toting around a lot of propane fired heaters and bottles. During the summer, I've had to come in as early as 03:00 and I've had to stay out as late as 22:00. Some branches have 1st / 2nd shifts and the biggest locations may have a 3rd shift, but the stand-alone branches only have one shift that is normally scheduled for 07:00 - 17:00, but you could easily have 5 different start times and 5 different quitting times in one week. 2) Mandatory overtime. Some people may view this as a "pro" rather than a "con"..... You're normally scheduled for 5 shifts of 10 hours. That's 50 scheduled hours, minus 2.5 hours per week for your 30 minute lunch and you're left with 47.5 scheduled. See my previous point in regards to this point as they are related. SSE tries to keep you at a minimum of 40 hours per week, but you can volunteer to leave early if the branch is particularly slow one day. 3) On-call rotation. Yet another thing that varies by location and by how many employees are in your department. SSE offers 24 / 7 / 365 availability to all their customers for emergency reasons. As an example, say a municipality has a water main break at 02:00 on a Saturday morning. They would call the "after hours" number and reach the "manager" (may be an actual manager, a dispatcher, or a salesperson) on call for that week. If the customer needs a backhoe and a light tower, the manager on-call then contacts the driver who in turn comes in, opens the branch up, loads the requested equipment and then delivers it to the customer before returning back to the branch and then back home. If you're in a larger branch, you may only be on call one week out of every 4 - 6 weeks, but at smaller branches it's common to be on call every other week or every third week. On-call is a mixed bag....you basically give up a week where you have to be ready to go at any time, but you are paid an additional $75 for that week even if you don't get called out after hours. If you are called out, you get a minimum of 2 hours at your normal hourly rate even if the job only takes 30 minutes. 4) DriveCam. This is a device that is mounted to the windshield of ever "marked" SSE vehicle. Essentially, if there's a company logo on the vehicle, there's a DriveCam installed. The camera has two views forward facing and one of the interior of the vehicle. It is on and recording 24 / 7 but it only saves 12 seconds (8 seconds before and 4 seconds after) of video & audio when an "event" is recorded. SSE defines an "event" as quick acceleration, hard braking, swerving, etc. 4) Health insurance plan through Blue Cross Blue Shield of AZ leaves a lot to be desired. It is a HDHP (High Deductible Health Plan) and my personal plan is for me and one child. My deductible is $5200 per year which means insurance doesn't kick in and start paying anything until I've reached my deductible. Your average rank-and-file employee can't necessarily afford to see a doctor unless it's a dire emergency. 5) Nepotism / "Good ol' boy" network. Nepotism runs rampant in SSE from the corporate HQ all the way down to the local branch level. It's not uncommon for husband & wife, brothers / sisters, childhood friends to be working in the same department or supervisor / employee in the same department. This often leads to things being swept under the rug or more elaborate schemes taking place. As an example, I've heard stories from another branch wherein the manager set up a fake company using his wife's maiden name and that company was providing cleaning services to the branch and SSE corporate was sending checks to the housekeeping company even though no such cleaning took place. 6) Upward career growth is virtually nonexistent. Many of the employees who were hired within the first 5 - 10 years of the company being founded in 1977 are still with the company and of course are in upper management. Mid and low level management are filled with your typical cronies who are friends or family of upper management and in turn they hire their friends / family at the branch management level. It's a great family type atmosphere. but that doesn't always make good business sense. Hire on as a driver and there's a 98% chance you'll still be a driver in 10 years. Same thing with mechanics. The only real advancement is to start as washrack and then move into yard person and finally into either the mechanic side or become a driver. 7) DOT laws & regulations are broken frequently. During the busy summer months it's not unusual to start at 05:00 and be running constantly until 18:00 or 19:00, go home and get a call from the on-call manager and then have to go back out for another couple hours before starting all over again at 05:00 the following day. I've personally done a 15 hour day, in clear violation of the 11/14 hour rule and then told to be back in 7 hours later which is in clear violation of the 10-hour break rule.
