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Tackling the Challenges of a New Workforce

made it difficult because the wage factors had not caught up to those benefits. And so we had to raise wages, as did a lot of the companies we compete with for labor. Once people started coming back to work, it was a very competitive market, and it wasn’t as easy to find employees.

Are you finding it more challenging to find skilled labor or unskilled employees?

We have really focused on technology and on finding ways to increase production without adding a lot of headcount. So the labor force we’re desiring is a more technical, more skilled workforce. That makes finding employees more difficult too. Even today, the areas we struggle with are in mechanical roles—so maintenance, engineering, more of the technical operators who understand how to run and adjust and skillfully operate equipment.

Packaging World:

When we last spoke, you mentioned that at the beginning of the pandemic, you had plenty of workers, but then during and after, your labor force was smaller. What drove that change?

Nolan Wolkow:

As we look at the time during the pandemic, there was a shift in the worker’s thought process. The main thing we saw was that there wasn’t a desire to go back to work right away. There were a lot of incentives from the government to actually stay out of work, which

We still can find individuals for more of the general labor roles; it’s the skilled labor that’s a challenge, and the reason for that is twofold. First, everybody’s looking for skilled labor, so there is a competitive aspect to finding that labor, and second, there aren’t a lot of people going into the manufacturing industry anymore. We’ve seen more of the younger generations gravitate toward work-from-home jobs with a flexible schedule. And so you don’t see as many individuals, the newer high school graduates, looking at manufacturing as where they want to go.

Do you see other changes in the new workforce that you’ve had to adjust to?

There are a lot of individuals who want to work Monday through Friday—they do not want to work on the weekend. And there’s enough available work out there for them that if they look around,

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