Pros

The stability of a power utility remains its greatest asset - and as our future depends more on power delivery (electric cars, homes, etc), demand can only grow.

Cons

Management is not in this venture for the long haul, the reviews are accurate - they celebrate stock price fluctuations, while they cut outage funds to bare minimum, and wonder why other utilities outperform them. They do bandaids, when entire replacements are necessary. When surveying competiive utilities, they establish competitive budgets, without considering factors such as age or use (another utility spends less on coal mills - however they had new mills, DTE never replaceed any - so the same maintenance budget on a 30yo mill is underfunded/ridiculous).

Advice to Senior Management

Quit

Pros

For the most part, job security is good. Benefits are good, but not what they were 10 years ago.
Pay is very good, at least in the plants.
The people I work with are great.

Cons

Predatory attendance policy, especially for shift workers. If you miss 3 days in a year, a fourth gets you a letter.
Each time you are off after that, you get another letter. They stay in your file for 9-12 months, if you get to the 4th, you're out.

Senior Management cuts repair and outage budgets to the bone, even on equipment that is well past "end of life".
Most of our tradespeople are within 10 years of retirement, and we have half the number of journeymen we had 10
years ago. Even when we get the money and parts to fix something, we no longer have enough people to get it
fixed in a timely manner.

Senior Management awards themselves huge bonuses, stock awards, and pay increases, while the message they
send us is that we should do more with less. They built a multi million dollar reflecting pool at the 3 office buildings
they have downtown, now known as 1 Energy Plaza, formerly 2000 2nd Ave, Detroit, MI.

At the same time, they discontinued the profit sharing for represented employees, the ones that make the power, and get it to our customers, and cut a periodic outage on a generating unit back 80% on time and money.

Upper mismanagement are looting the company, and inventing executive jobs for their friends.
The only concern downtown is what did the stock price do today, and how much money did we make.

Advice to Senior Management

Get some people with an Operating and/or Engineering (real engineering) background in upper management,
and listen to them. The plants are falling apart. Stop looking down on the people that do the work, and work with
us to fix things, instead of focusing on workforce reduction, and cutting our benefits at contract time.
Our company is full of very intelligent people, many of whom are disgusted by the waste and excess
downtown, while being told to do more with less, or else. We all want DeCo to thrive, we need partners in
Senior Management to make that happen. Not adversaries.