My recycling wasn’t picked up for a month. The garbage company said there was a shortage of drivers.
Mike Fredrich shows off unmanned presses in his Manitowoc, Wisconsin, company.
They’re ready to start production at MCM Composites, a 55-person enterprise that makes custom thermoset molding.The only problem? Fredrich has no one to operate them.
“These tools are heated to 300 degrees,” he said. “But we’re not running them. Had we had the people for the first shift, we could have been running this all day. But we don’t, so they sit here heated, ready to go, with no action.”
Fredrich said the business has gone to extremes to try to find the 15 additional employees it needs. But he’s had little success.
“There are no workers, but there’s a huge demand. The economy has picked up, but the market is so thin, that we just can’t find them. We’ve gone to extraordinary means to find people that will actually work, including going to the local county jail and recruiting people to work from inside the jail,” Fredrich said.
My ahole uncle can’t find “honest workers willing to do real work – they are all lazy bums that don’t want a job just welfare”. The fact that he wants to pay them horrible wages is absolutely not a factor in his mind at all.
Photo: Joel Coblenz