American Red Cross reviews

Don’t let the humanitarian language or non-profit label fool you. This is a company. It is run like a company. You are replaceable. The quality and merit of your work isn’t rewarded. People are given opportunities based on favoritism and convenience to upper management. They gave a management position to someone who publicly and unprofessionally harassed other workers on numerous occasions. That should give you an idea of the type of people they're willing to promote. There is prominent toxic favoritism. There are individuals that receive a troublesome amount of second-chances compared to others. There are those that are allowed to get away with certain things compared to others. People are targeted or harassed more than others seemingly on a whim. The company will then tell you to forgive and forget, or to move on. Even if you objectively have no justifiable reason to do so. New ideas in optimizing and innovating workflow or general work standards are mostly ignored. Every location needs to be set up the same way. If an issue arises at a location that does something different. It will be blamed as the reason for the issue, even if it had nothing to do with it. If you are an individual that is consistent at the high quality of their work, you will be taken for granted. They'll convince you that you are important and needed so they can get more work out of you. Your time is better spent somewhere better.

You are INCREDIBLY overworked and GROSSLY underpaid. You get zero work-life balance. Even when you're not on call, you'll still get tons of calls from volunteers with questions and concerns. If a volunteer is unavailable to respond to a fire call or tend to any other responsibility day or night, you're on deck. You're salaried, so there's no overtime pay. Your pay barely covers the basic cost of living in today's economy ($40k-$50k). Diversity is bottom heavy, meaning there are lots of employees of color in entry level or lower management roles, but beyond that there's a steep drop off. Most of the volunteers are great, but the Red Cross is so desperate to keep them, that poor behavior and language (racist/sexist/phobic) is not properly disciplined or responded to, if at all. Employee retention is poor, especially in the Disaster Specialist role, because they burn you out so quickly without decent pay.