Pros
Decent pay upon starting job along with annual rises. Annualised hours system means you get to take home extra money/have extra time off work. Company shop can be useful. Shift patterns can be beneficial depending on your circumstances. Canteens in factory are good for breaks, decent food and drink offerings. Extra benefits such as health insurance can be very useful.
Cons
Annual pay rises could be more. Work can often get stressful, can feel pressure to run production as fast as possible when you dont have the staff or machinery to do so. Upper management on site at least seem rather tone deaf. The production line I work on is in desperate need of newer machinery and management would rather paint the machinery and put new perspex guards on it, paying a lot of money in the process, rather than purchasing new machinery and replacing the ancient stuff we have to put up with every day. Huge issues with communication between departments. One team says to run the line, another team says to not run it as maintenance is needed. Both of those teams havent communicated, and theres no solid plan to go off. Shift patterns can be mentally and physically draining at times, especially if you are not used to them. Management at the top of the company force us to go along with their new processes such as logging production on a "manufacturing operating system" whiteboard, to set target quantities, despite us already logging production twice elsewhere to different target quantities. Its needlessly complicated. Members of management often do not understand how lines operate and what needs to be done for them to run. Ive had them demand me to run a line despite not having the staff or resources to do so, blissfully unaware of what we have to do. Company likes to go on about "freedom to succeed" and go up in the company but ive seen people rejected from career opportunities for extremely silly reasons. Overall, too many people sat in comfy chairs in offices, and not enough on production lines.