Nobody thinks about the pallet until they get to the grocery store craving a box of Fruity Pebbles and the shelf is empty. That is true of most of what we do in this industry. We are the layer nobody notices, the plant floor and the truck route behind every shelf that stays stocked, and all of it depends on people. This year the harder question is not just whether we can hire fast enough. It is whether we can keep the workforce we already have and build something steady enough to hold up, and that is not one simple story.
Keeping that workforce steady right now depends on more than one thing. Retirements are outpacing the workers coming in behind them. Regional labor pools are tighter in some parts of the country than others. And in places with heavy immigration enforcement this year, staffing is getting harder in ways that have nothing to do with whether a company is doing everything right.
One Minnesota plant manager told me this year that his company is fully E-Verify compliant, every employee cleared, no exceptions. But as ICE presence increased in their area, employees still got nervous about being on the road during the day, worried that being visible on the drive to work could draw attention no matter what their paperwork said. The company responded by rebuilding its entire shift structure so fewer employees were driving during the hours they felt most exposed.
That same question came up differently when I wrote about women and participation in August. Women make up about 29 percent of the U.S. manufacturing workforce, despite making up nearly half of the overall U.S. workforce. A female business owner in the Midwest told me something last year that has stuck with me since. Automation has opened production roles to more women than she has seen in 24 years running her plant, because it takes raw strength out of the equation for certain tasks.
Camera-based AI tools are doing similar work elsewhere on the floor, giving managers a live view of the plant, catching defects, tracking safety incidents and flagging bottlenecks as they happen instead of after a customer complains. That kind of visibility used to mean adding people just to watch other people work, which is headcount most plants cannot spare right now. The same tools solving a labor shortage are also widening who gets to do the job in the first place.
And then there are the companies looking at this from the other direction: how do you help people stay? The companies handling that best right now are not necessarily the ones paying the most. A couple of examples from this industry have stuck with me this year. One operation converted an old motel next to their plant into transitional housing, giving people coming out of incarceration a place to live along with a job and life skills training, budgeting, communication, how to hold down a routine.
Another keeps a chaplain on staff who travels between facilities, and not just for spiritual matters. He helps people cover rent, find childcare, or get back on their feet after a relapse. One owner I heard about put it simply: if the business will not give someone another chance, who will? None of that shows up in a job posting. It shows up in who stays.
A chaplain program will not fix immigration policy. A camera on the line will not replace a shift schedule built around keeping people safe on the drive home. And automation will not replace a manager who knows what is happening in his people's lives. But all of those things are part of the workforce conversation now, because the companies that keep good people will have to think beyond the job itself. They will have to think about how people get to work, what happens when life gets difficult, who can do the job because technology changed it, and whether employees believe the company actually wants them there.
If you are reading this as a business owner, the first move is not a bigger paycheck.
Review your own culture before you touch the wage board. Ask the people who have stayed the longest why they are still there, and ask the ones who left why they were not. Look at what you offer beyond wages: a referral program that actually pays out, a benefit that solves a real problem, someone employees can call when life outside the plant gets hard. None of it has to be a five year plan. It just has to start.
We spend a lot of time talking about the pallet as the thing holding everything else together. Maybe the workforce deserves the same attention.
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“None of this shows up in
a job posting. It shows up
in who stays.”
Emily Clark
September 2026
“None of this shows up in
a job posting. It shows up
in who stays.”
Emily Clark