They bring in supervisors from middle eastern countries with zero Canadian experience. These Saudi and Egyptian supervisors have zero knowledge of labor laws in Canada and themselves work 14 - 15 hour days and expect ALL designers to do so as well without pay!! PERI is very big in the middle eastern countries. So they bring in their supervisors from these countries where the labor laws are non-existent. These middle eastern supervisors will demand you work extra hours without pay and if you as much as question this, you will promptly be let go. But since Canadian workers would call them out for this BS, PERI exclusively hires recent immigrants as their designers, who cannot afford to complain.
Over 90% of the workforce at PERI Canada are recent immigrants. This seems to be the business plan of PERI - to hire recent immigrants (and who are engineering graduates) who cannot afford to complain because this is their first job and they don't want to ruffle any feathers. The pay is almost 30% less than what is the average starting salary of a new graduate. In Vancouver, the starting salary is 51k and increases about 2% every year. Someone who has been with PERI for over 10 years makes just over 60k!! For comparison, most recent engineer graduates start of with an average salary of 65k in Vancouver, BC!
For most recent immigrant with an engineering degree, this is their first job in Canada and those that stick around for over a few years are stuck there because formwork design skills are not transferable to other structural engineering companies. My advice to engineers is to stay away from PERI!