Hiring and retaining workers isn’t just a problem for the printing industry — labor challenges persist across every state, in every sector, and every business type. Attracting — and keeping — the best workers means standing out against all the other businesses competing for the same talent. And that means having a solid compensation plan in place.
But to know if your compensation plan is stand-out or lackluster means understanding the overall trends for the industry at large. And that is where Adrienne Harrison, vice president of Human Resources; and Onamica Dhar, economist, PRINTING United Alliance, come in.
First of all, Harrison sets the stage for the labor challenges right now, and that starts at the very foundation — where the people are.
“The fertility rate, which is really birth per women in in the United States has gone down since 2008, which means that our workforce numbers are declining,” she noted. “Also immigration is declining, so we don’t make up the lack of live births in our country with immigration anymore. We are working at a pretty hard deficit going into the long term, so you have to really strategically plan for your company to understand declining workforce numbers.
“We’re an industry that has a lot of people who are aging out, and fewer people coming in. Baby boomers are leaving the workforce — not printing specifically, but the workforce — at 11,000 per day,” she continued. “The good news is in the face of an uncertain economy, people are less likely to leave. So your retention rates are going to go up right now because people are afraid that they’re not going to get another job. And I see this as an opportunity for you to build a really good culture and then keep them there — that’s really, really important.”
Read the rest of this story on Printing Impressions, a publication of PRINTING United Alliance, ASI’s strategic partners.
