One of the elements that stood out about MMI Engineered Solutions Inc., the 2021 winner of Plastics News' Processor of the Year award, was its outreach to refugees to help fill jobs.
As of the end of January this year, it had 39 refugees on the payroll, most from Afghanistan.
As our sister paper Crain's Cleveland Business reports, immigrant populations are proving a solid source for other molders seeking employees.
Mick Jendrisak at Pilot Plastics Inc., a custom injection-molding manufacturer near Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, had added six presses and was facing a tough uphill climb to find employees. After doing some internal restructuring to make the company a more desirable workplace, the company looked at its existing workforce for ideas about where it should reach out. A standout worker was an immigrant from Nepal and said other Nepalis may be interested in jobs there as well.
"What we did was printed up flyers in both Nepali and Hindi," Jendrisak told reporter Kim Palmer. "We put them all over in the Nepali community — at the grocery stores and the little boutiques everywhere that would allow us."
About 85 percent of Pilot's overnight workforce currently are Nepali immigrants.