Editor’s note: This story by Matt Hongoltz-Hetling first appeared in the Valley News on Nov. 15.
[R]OYALTON — South Royalton resident John Dettwiler was sitting at a round table off the lobby of GW Plastics. “My resume,” he said, “this looks terrible.”
Dettwiler was one of about 35 job applicants who spent a chunk of their Saturday at a job fair that GW Plastics hopes will help fill about 70 new jobs that are expected to be created during a three-year, $10 million, expansion.
Dettwiler, several of the other applicants, and the plastics firm itself all have been trying to find a path forward in a manufacturing economy that has been dramatically altered by advances in technology and the recent national recession.
That’s led to Dettwiler’s concerns about his own resume. His employment history makes it look as if he’s flitted from job to job after short periods, which he knows will raise questions about his long-term reliability for GW Plastics and other future employers.
But, Dettwiler said, he hasn’t been the unstable one — it’s the companies themselves, caught in market forces that continue to transform the country’s manufacturing economy.
For example, he used to work in Claremont at the Tambrands plant, until it closed in 2002.
It was the same story with other employers, including a mine in Ludlow, Vt., that was closed by Luzenac America, a France-based company.
“Closed, closed, layoffs, closed,” he said.
Dettwiler’s not alone.
In January 2001, there were more than 47,000 manufacturing jobs in the state of Vermont, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. By January 2010, the height of the recession, that number had plummeted to about 30,800.
That decline mirrors a national trend, with the U.S. showing manufacturing jobs falling to a low of 11.4 million in 2010 from about 17.3 million in 2001.
But, while the U.S. manufacturing economy as a whole has shown some growth since 2010, up to 12.3 million jobs this year, Vermont’s totals more or less have been stagnant during the same time period, with 30,600 jobs in 2015 — 200 fewer than five years ago.
Cathy Tempesta, director of human resources at GW Plastics, said frequent employment changes are indeed a red flag to her.
“If someone’s been four months at one place, six months at the next, it raises concerns,” she said. “When someone’s been in a company for a long time, that’s a good sign.”
She said that, in a face-to-face interview, she’s able to distinguish between those who have been poor employees, and cases like Dettwiler’s, where the worker has been the victim of layoffs or plant closures — usually.
“You never get it 100 percent,” she said.
Plant manager Scott Perkins said that, as technology and globalization have transformed the workplace, he’s also seen cultural changes that make it more difficult to find the right candidates.
“It boils down to ambition, ownership of responsibility,” Perkins said. “There used to be more of that.”
Some of the other applicants at GW Plastics on Saturday said they’d also been caught trying to keep up with manufacturing jobs as they shrink or move.
“I’ve been in factories, goodness, for over 15 years,” said 34-year-old Romar Downs, of Whitehall, N.Y., which is about a 90-minute drive from Royalton.
“They move,” Downs said. “The jobs move. At one point in time, it was simpler for me to find them in the location I was living in, but then they move farther north or they move south or, ultimately, they just stopped.”
Downs used to work making lawn mowers at Troy-Bilt in Troy, N.Y., but a few years after he started, the company was purchased by Garden Way, which then declared bankruptcy and closed the plant.
Dettwiler, Downs and other applicants took a tour of the GW Plastics facility. Ostensibly, they were there to sell themselves to the company, but Mark Hammond, general manager of the company’s silicone division, also was selling the company as a workplace that is stable.
Standing in an empty room with observation windows that looked down on about 10 large silicone production units, Hammond told the applicants that, compared with large, public companies chasing quarterly profits, GW Plastics has seen “slower growth, but calculated and safe growth. It’s slow and steady.”
The production units, most of which were feeding small, intricately crafted silicone products into large cardboard boxes by way of conveyor belts, go around the clock.
“We need operators to run the machines,” Hammond said. “We need technicians to run the machines.”
Despite the tumultuous times, the plastics firm has managed to grow consistently over the years by being nimble and flexible.
When the automobile manufacturing market went to Mexico, GW Plastics opened a plant in that country to maintain its contracts. When it became clear that China’s economy was booming, it opened a small plant there, which since has doubled in size.
“Globalization is a necessity,” Hammond said. “If it was this one facility in Vermont, we probably wouldn’t be here.”
The company also has expanded its customer base, and is settling in to what it hopes will be a long and fruitful relationship with medical supply companies across the country.
In 2008, it added a silicone division, which grew to the 10 now in operation from just three manufacturing units. Between the molding machines, the robotic transportation systems and the pumping systems, each unit costs about $500,000, Hammond said, and within a year, there will be six more online.
Hammond said the company’s biggest challenge has been hiring a decent labor force, and with more jobs coming, the pressure to find good workers only will grow.
“Our biggest complaint in Vermont is getting qualified people,” he said. “It’s a relatively small base that we’re pulling from.”
And the vast cultural difference between rural Vermont and the urban areas that have more concentrated labor pools can make it difficult to solve the problem by worker relocation.
“We’ve learned that you can’t just import help,” Hammond said. “To transplant someone from Massachusetts isn’t always the right thing to do.”
The job fair is one part of a larger effort by the company to be more of a presence in the area community. Part of the issue is that young workers just don’t think about GW Plastics as a place to aspire to, Hammond said.
“No kid comes out of high school thinking manufacturing,” he said. “There’s a lot of high-tech stuff going on here, but they just wouldn’t know it.”
At 57, self-described “jack of all trades, master of many” Paul Easton said his body has begun to let him know in recent years that his primary vocation, carpentry, may not be sustainable. But he’d like to put in another 15 years before he retires.
“I’m willing to start at the bottom,” Easton said. “It’s a big deal for me.”
After 21 years in Royalton, he’s going to Vermont Technical College, which has a partnership with GW Plastics, to get a vocational degree. In the meantime, he hopes to land an entry-level position at the plastics company and move up.
Easton said he was impressed with the GW Plastics plant, and with the way it’s aggressively worked with area high schools and VTC to create a pipeline of skilled workers.
“It’s going to change central Vermont,” he said.
