Another manufacturing plant is set to close late this year in northeast Wisconsin and this time it’s at a Howard facility called Ameridrives International. That closing will result in the loss of about 40 jobs, but NBC26 has reported on several other plants closing in our region for the better part of a month. Today we wanted to find out, is this unusual?
Foster Needle out of Manitowoc is about to close their plant. That will result in the loss of about 60 jobs.
"Manufacturing is still a very globally competitive sector to be in," says Jim Golembeski the Executive Director of the Bay Area Workforce Development Board.
When Graphic Packaging closes in Menasha, there's another 230 employees out of work too.
"There are going to be contractions in the industry and there are some companies that will move on or go out of business," adds Ann Franz the Strategic Partnership Manager at NWTC.
And at the TreeHouse Foods plant, formally known at the ConAgra plant in Ripon, 60 more people are said to be out of a job by the end of the year. While this news is absolutely daunting for those impacted, job finders say now is actually a good time to be in the predicament.
"I’m going to have employers lined up outside the door to talk to them," adds Golembeski.
There are over 2000 manufacturing companies in northeast Wisconsin and in Brown County alone right now there are 1400 job openings in the manufacturing industry.
"They should be able to find something very quickly," adds Franz.
And for the 37 folks working at Ameridrives in Howard, it’s believed that their skills are transferrable.
"You can be a machinist at a food plant and you take that over to a plastics company and be a machinist there. It's very transferrable," adds Franz.
And with an unemployment rate of about 4 percent right now, the industry is hiring.
"It’s probably the strongest job market I've ever seen," says Golembeski.
Another glimmer of optimism for employees in the industry is that employers are looking for hard workers, with good track records and not someone who has to go back to school to get training.
