Complaint Review: Ecolab Equipment Care - Fishers Indiana

This report modifies and expands upon the report I submitted yesterday that revealed that Ecolab Equipment Care in Fishers, IN needs to improve their dispatcher training program.  I did not mean to imply in that report that Ecolab had ripped me off in terms of money; in fact,  I told several co-workers that I felt bad that I was being paid to train for several months but not yet "producing goods and services" and truly earning my paycheck.

As I stated in so many words in that initial report, one could with good cause refute my grievance saying, "So what if you were not trained properly.  I or people I know are terribly underpaid, the company stole their retirement funds, forced them to work in dangerous conditions because management violates OSHA safety requirements, have to endure reverse racism (rampant in Los Angeles area), and/or otherwise forced to suffer some sort of inhumane mistreatment."

Further, not all dispatchers hired and trained in the past few at EEC years have failed at their job; their success depends upon several factors: their background (some dispatchers transferred from EEC parts department or other EEC departmenst, from being techs in the field, from working in the restaurant industry, or worked as dispatchers elsewhere), have relatives and friends working for EEC that give them special attention, or just have a natural aptitude and love of the work and restaurant industry

I can also state that I have worked for just horrible companies and working for EEC was not as bad as those companies were, but the point I was trying to make is that EEC's management's refusal to evaluate their dispatcher training program, possibly because they only train about a dozen or so dispatchers a year, shows that they don't care about the negative emotional impact on the trainee, the effect on the techs in the field, the mangers, or the customers.  Couple that lack of concern for an improved training program with the fact that many markets EEC serves are short of technicians which puts unnecessary stress on the dispatchers, technicians, customers and all maybe even their families.  Compare EEC attitude with Comcast's goal to dispatch techs within two hours, and perhaps my point is more clear, although that is not a perfect comparison because EEC serves  a more specialized customer while Comcast serves the general population.

This dispatcher job does not involve rocket science and only requires a high school diploma, but if I have good grades in my something short of 250 college credits, have my CCNA (CISCO Certified Network Associate), studied computer repair, have been a certified EMT training at UCLA, have been a premed student, earned A's in all my accounting courses, finished astronomy exams in ten or so minutes with all A's, and then get started on the job at EEC as a dispatcher and can't do one thing right, then their training method is partly to blame.

This statement does not imply that EEC is a totally bad place to work with little demonic characters running around.  That is not the case at all.  My concern and complaint is that if a company is cutting costs to the point that it won't spend roughly a $100 bucks on the supplied for printing up about a dozen updated training manuals, spend an extra week in a training room setting where full instruction on the entire job duties is provided along with involving the trainee in simulations of the actual job before they are sent out to cover a real market, then it is a bad sign that Ecolab just doesn't care.

I can't tell you how hard it was on me emotionally to attempt this dispatching job without proper training.  Even though I am hardly a celebrity, such a situation very negatively affects one reputation, and this is truly a small world after all with a tough job market.   Not having a good current reference makes it difficult to get future jobs.

The more broad statement I want to make is that I noticed signs and symptoms at Ecolab that is common at most corporations currently that we are headed towards a slave state where only a few super wealthy, powerful people control all the resources.