Kickstart: Child care and a tight labor market

The fight to retain and hire workers has packaging giant Alpla providing assistance to U.S. employees in need of child care.

Alpla is working with Tootris, a San Diego-based company that works with employers to offer "a comprehensive turnkey child care benefits platform that shows real-time inventory of available openings at state-licensed … providers, after-school programs and extracurricular programs."

Alpla will also contribute toward monthly child care expenses, although it did not specifically say what that would involve.

In a news release, Tootris notes that Alpla saw sales grow more than 25 percent in 2022 and it needs to ensure it maintains the workforce needed to continue its growth.

It isn't alone in adding child care to its list of benefits. Last year, auto supplier Gentex Corp. said it would build an on-site day care for its employees. And Vivian Allen, CEO of Texas-based injection molder SigmaPro, said that when the company was sold recently it ensured that new owners would retain its on-site child care facility.

Has your company considered assisting workers through child care programs? Plastics News will be writing more about this topic. Feel free to drop me an email, [email protected], if you want to share your story.

The U.S. Department of Justice has indicted the former CEO of medical device maker Stimwave LLC "in connection with a scheme to create and sell a nonfunctioning dummy plastic medical device for implantation into patients suffering from chronic pain, resulting in millions of dollars in losses to federal health care programs."

Laura Perryman, 54, has been charged with one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and health care fraud and one count of health care fraud. Stimwave entered bankruptcy protection in 2022.

The company claimed its medical device could be implanted into the body to block pain. But when doctors had problems with one of the three parts in the device, Perryman and Stimwave offered a different, smaller part that it charged the same amount of money for but in fact would not work, DOJ said in a March 10 news release.

"Perryman oversaw training that suggested to doctors that the White Stylet was a 'receiver,' when, in fact, it was made entirely of plastic, contained no copper, and therefore had no conductivity," it said.

Under a civil fraud lawsuit, Stimwave admitted and accepted responsibility for its conduct and agreed to pay $8.6 million.

Let's say that your company's cash assets were at a bank that collapsed. What do you do? Slash prices for the toys you sell to anyone using the code "BANKRUN." This isn't a hypothetical. It's what New York-based toy retailer Camp did March 10 in the hours after Silicon Valley Bank collapsed.

"All sales from this point forward will deposit into Chase and allow us to generate the cash needed to continue operations so we can continue to deliver unforgettable family memories," Camp said in a note to its customers, as our sister paper Advertising Age writes.

The retailer has both online sales and brick-and-mortar toy stores with special "immersive" experiences that replicate the world of Disney's Encanto or TV's Paw Patrol.