DeKalb Molded Plastics Earn 40 Work 30 Program

Article by Jeff Jones | KPC News | July 8, 2021

BUTLER — Businesses and industries have had to get creative to attract people to fill open positions.

Sometimes, you have to think outside the box and do things other employers can’t or won’t do.

Locally-owned DeKalb Molded Plastics in Butler is piloting a program where people work 30 hours a week — 6 hours a day — but are paid for 40 hours, according to general manager Doug Bonecutter.

“They will have the opportunity to earn overtime,” he said. “If you volunteer to work Saturday or Sunday and you’ve worked your 30 hours during the week, you’ll get paid time-and-a-half for Saturday and Sunday.”

Like Monday through Friday, the voluntary overtime shifts will be six hours per day.

Workers in this program are also eligible for benefits, including 401(k), vacation, bereavement and more.

The company kicked off the program June 30, with three applicants now in the pre-hire process. The goal is to have five workers per shift in the program.

DeKalb Molded Plastics is a niche, injection-molding company, producing big plastic parts for agricultural, medical, event flooring, material handling and highway traffic safety industries.

“The bottom line is, we know we’re not going to be the highest-paying employer in the Butler area, so we have to be different,” Bonecutter explained. “To draw people in, let’s poll our workers, get some feedback from them, and a work-life balance really seemed to be a big, big deal to them.”

The program is currently available to incoming employees, but the goal is to offer it to the company’s senior employees in the future.

“Right now, it’s only for incoming employees,” Bonecutter said. “After we get this rolled out, we’ll see what it looks like, but we will eventually allow our senior employees, if they so choose, they can do that as well.”

DeKalb Molded employs 55 people, but he sees the potential to add 10-15 jobs easily.

“We have a bunch of backlog and not enough people to run it all,” he said. “That’s the driving force. We need more labor.”

Necessity is the mother of invention, and the business isn’t afraid to try new ideas.

“I would say this is the most out-of-the-box,” Bonecutter said. “We’re very creative. We tried a referral program where it didn’t matter how many people you brought to the door, for every person that you brought in and they continued to work, you got a $1 an hour extra pay for the first 90 days they worked.

“If you brought in five in one week, your pay instantly went up $5 an hour, including overtime and everything else,” he explained. “We’ve done retention bonuses, referral bonuses, attendance bonuses— you name it, we’ve done it.”

This idea emerged from professional groups DeKalb Molded Plastics belongs to, with success in other regions.

“It’s probably the reason why we were so excited about this program, because (other ideas) didn’t work,” Bonecutter stated. “It just told us it’s not really about the money. It’s more about the work-life balance.

“It’ll all be voluntary overtime on the weekends, but it will be only be a 6-hour shift,” he said. “You’re not going to have people working 10-12 hours a day in this program. It’s solely set up for work-life balance.”

Immediately after the program was announced, DeKalb Molded saw a spike in interest from job-seekers after having just one or two people a week inquiring about jobs.

“Our hope is the foot traffic stays high and we can fill the 20 positions we have,” he said.

The company embraces technology, adding three new robots in the past 18 months to make jobs easier and more ergonomically-friendly for employees.

Five of the nine presses in the facility have robotics to assist with tasks, with a goal to equip every press.

“When I say we make big plastic parts, it’s not that they’re heavy necessarily, sometimes it’s just awkwardness,” Bonecutter said. “That’s why the robots have made it so much better to present the part to the operator versus the operator having to go get the part and have it presented to them.”

Article source: https://www.kpcnews.com/butlerbulletin/article_839a5e7b-ba98-5bd2-a452-266068af0b1e.html