The Tenure of Your Company’s Workforce: Your Strength and Your Weakness

July 30, 2018

AICC recently released its biennial Salary, Hourly Wage & Benefit Survey. The 2018 report collected salary and wage data from 85 member companies employing 8,872 workers across the U.S. As I was doing my normal review of the data tables provided by our third-party statistics-gathering firm, something struck me about the nature of our AICC members’ workforces, and that is the average number of years of service that workers in our industry have given our member companies. To me, the numbers show a dedicated, experienced workforce delivering the very best in quality, customer service, and creative innovation.

For example, looking at the corrugator and sheet feeder respondents in the West/Midwest and Southeast, we see that their double-backer operators have, respectively, average years of service of 24 and 21.5 years. The rookies are working in the Great Lakes states and have a mere 13 years’ experience. Our sheet plant members responded with similarly impressive numbers. Consider, for example, the scheduler position. Members in the Southwest/Southeast areas report that their schedulers have 17.2 years of experience in that position; in the Northeast, it’s 21 years! I could go on in position after position, whether salaried or hourly. The numbers are the same.

These brief examples are illustrative of the kinds of data our survey reveals. But this column is not about selling you a survey; it’s to make a point about the value that an experienced and educated workforce brings to you and your customers. While years-of-service awards are common in all walks of the business community, I suspect that the breadth of the employment longevity revealed by our 2018 survey is unique to independent, privately held businesses such as AICC members.

Yet, as loudly as these examples speak about the strengths of an experienced workforce, they also reveal the fact that we have an aging workforce, one whose participants will be reaching retirement age sooner rather than later. And how, with the workforce recruitment challenges being faced across the manufacturing landscape, will we replace them fast enough?

Here’s where Al Hoodwin’s suggestion, explained in his opening column in this issue, makes sense: The industry has to continue to expand the spectrum of box plant processes that can be automated. We have many current examples—things like machine feeding and takeoff and material handling—but what are the others, those not as obvious?

Here’s where you come in. Send a note to our helpwanted@aiccbox.org email address and tell us your thoughts about this issue. Our industry’s supplier members are making great strides in helping member companies automate not only for efficiency, but also to solve the problem of so many years of boxmaking experience that will be lost in the years ahead.