I am an employee of Schwan's Home Service and am embarassed to tell anyone. When I was hired as a Customer Service Manager (a glorified title, which is actually a truck driver), I was baited with the promise of a decent income and potential commissions, based on my sales. Being production oriented and a hard worker all of my life, this sounded good. However, I was never told that I would be working no less than 15 hours a day, five days a week (and sometimes a sixth), but only getting the same pay that everyone else in the nation gets for working 40 hours.

Also, I worked for 19 months before I was allowed to schedule a vacation. After scheduling the vacation and purchasing plane tickets and arranging accomodations and rental car, my new manager (who was hired from outside the company and was never a Customer Service Manager himself) denied my vacation three days prior to my departure date. I lost all the money I spent on it and was not allowed any time off until the holidays (five months later). The funny thing was that this same "manager" (who has no management training and absolutely no people skills or human resources experience) took his vacation just three weeks later and two additional weeks before the end of that year. I have yet to file any grievance with human resources for fear of losing my job.

Even though this is a company that has many good things going for it (everything but the Home Service side), it is not a good company to work for. Turnover is very high because of how horribly it treats it's employees. This job will rob you of your life, your family, and your health, and general peace of mind. I long for the day when our economy improves enough for me to find decent employment away from this sweat shop. Ironically, very large bonuses are paid to Schwan's Home Service managers, their warehouse managers (which makes no sense), and their District General Managers if their depot meets their annual projections. If the company paid the employees (the ones that actually do the work and give up their lives for it) the bonuses, they would have better retention. If Schwan's Home Service was unionized, it would close. If the US Department of Labor knew how badly we were treated (for such little pay), they would shut them down immediately.

I'm not disgruntled, I'm just disappointed that this company is so abusive to it's employees. The very people on the front lines that make the company as successful as it is. It's a shame, and when I do leave the company, there's no way in *** I'll ever buy anything from them again. The food's not that good and I get better quality for lower prices at Sam's, Costco, and most grocery stores. =)