Mississippi firm looks to former prisoners to plug the skills gap

Tom Nathanson, the CEO of custom film extruder and bag maker Summit Plastics Inc. in Mississippi, has a new way to find potential employees: from the ranks of recently released inmates from the state's prison system.

Nathanson is working with the state's Department of Corrections and hopes to bring in the first potential employees in the next three months at the company's factory in Summit, Miss.

He said he read about a similar prison-to-work program at a plastics company in North Carolina and approached Mississippi DOC officials with the idea.

I wrote the stories and did a podcast on the North Carolina company, Carolina Color, that Nathanson said caught his interest back in 2017. So I was interested to hear how he now wants to do something similar in Mississippi.

I was impressed by what I saw when I visited Carolina Color. Everybody I talked with there said it benefited both the firm and the employees, who were paid market wages and used the jobs as ladders to do things like buy homes.

Nathanson admits getting employees from a prison release program is not something he's tried before in his four decades in the plastics industry, mostly working as an executive at other companies.

Like Carolina Color, he sees it as both a positive for his business — getting candidates in hard-to-fill jobs — and as a positive for the paroled inmates, giving them a chance at a fresh start.

"It's a win, win, win, win situation," Nathanson said. "We believe that people need a second chance, and we're willing to give that to them and combine that with we're always looking for good people."

He bought Summit, which has 90 employees, in 2015.

"Now that I finally own a company, I can do these types of things and follow my belief system and value system and get these things done," he said.

His company is not alone in struggling to find the right employees. The National Association of Manufacturers said that for the last nine quarters, companies in its outlook survey have ranked attracting and keeping good workers as their top challenge.

Nathanson said his company typically has to go through 40 applicants to get one employee who will remain in the job for more than six months. People may not make it through initial interviews, they may fail drug screens or they may start the job and decide it's not the right fit for them, he said.

"The key word is the right people," he said. "We never have problems with people wanting to come to work for us. The issue is getting the right people to come to work for us."

Former inmates, he believes, can be a new source.

"I think people like that who've had time to reflect, they'll be better employees because they're not going to make those mistakes," he said. "They're going to appreciate the value of a good company and a good job, and they should make great employees."

Nathanson admits this program is a leap for the company, and it's early stages for the state as well. The former prisoners will have already completed a manufacturing basic skills certificate program at a community college before applying at Summit.

Nathanson sees hiring after prison as a continuation of other aspects of what he calls an employee-centric approach that he believes ultimately benefits his bottom line, like quarterly bonuses and interest-free emergency loans "because life happens."

Of course we can't say if Nathanson's efforts will be successful, but he's hopeful.

"What I would like to think is that these are people who somewhere along the way obviously they made a mistake," Nathanson said. "They've had time to reflect on that and think, 'Gee, if I had to do it over.' And we're looking to be their do-over spot."

Toloken is a Washington-based Plastics News assistant managing editor and author of the BRICS and Plastics blog. Follow him on Twitter @Steve_Toloken.