Please Allow Me to Introduce Myself – Part XXVI

FEL needed dozens of hourly employees and they needed them fast. Contracts were underway requiring on-time deliveries and with a skeleton workforce, there was no way these conditions could be met.  With the chief clients being the United States Navy and IBM Corporation, respectively, there was little wiggle room for errors and excuses.  The work needed to get done on time or else.

Giving some thought to a business model that a staffing agency friend once shared with me, I considered replicating that firm's past efforts to recruit employees in urban downtowns in close proximity to their clients. The staffing firm I was planning to emulate often located relatively inexpensive office space - at street level - in urban downtowns with heavy foot traffic. They recruited new empoyees from these satellite offices and most of the time did exceedingly well.

Since FEL was located on the backroads of Farmingdale, where there was limited drive-by traffic, the satellite office model made good sense.  I pitched it to the President of FEL and he asked me to explore office space somewhere I thought we might do well. My first thought was Main Street in Asbury Park - an economically depressed town with high unemployment.

In less than a week, I was able to locate a small office in the heart of downtown Asbury Park.  The tiny office was located between a bar and a tatoo parlor on Main Street.  It was the perfect location to house a recruiting office in more ways than one - at least it offered some hope to a large number of people thinking their problems could be solved at the bottom of a whiskey bottle.  Of course, I also realized that we would often be confronted by and have to deal with those giving the whiskey bottle the first benefit of the doubt.  Rejecting angry drunks for work would not be a pleasant or safe experience.

In any case, we opened our satellite recruitment office in about a week and put the word out on the street that we had many jobs available. These werer mostly good union jobs with future potential in the manufacturing trades.  We needed, mechanical and electrical assemblers, production workers, welders, platers, machine operators, forklift drivers and other entry level types to start with.  There were plenty of jobs to go around.  And, we would train for them.

In less that two weeks we had more than 700 completed job applications on hand to consider. Because of all the NJ state entitlement services offices located within Asbury Park, the city was a magnet town for the unemployed and a great deal of underemployed people from all over the region.  We quickly noticed that people were coming to town from major cities like Detroit, Washington DC and Baltimore to be near to state and federal assistance.  Some were good people just down on their luck, while others were chronic losers (i.e. repeat criminals, alcoholics and deadbeat child support evaders), drifters and drug addicted types. We tried to be extra careful not to introduce drugs and violence into our workplace.

So, we had lots of newcomers to choose from.  Many, though, had one thing in common - a lack of reliable transportation.  This was an early problem we needed to consider before we could move on by offering jobs. How would we get these new employees to and from work?  The Union was watching our decision-making very closely. We could not do anything for one group of employees that we would not do for the rest.  They would not appreciate us transporting these people totally at the company's expense, when everyone else had to pay their own way to and from home.

I knew several people in county government fairly well and I eventually worked my way to the county director of transportation.  Steve was a very sharp and "with it" public servant.  He had an entrepreneurial way about him that was particularly refreshing and admirable.  Immediately, Steve knew what to do. He would ask the Monmouth County Freeholders to consider allowing FEL to contract with some county transportation providers at the county contracted billing rate.  In other words, FEL would offer the people it hired the same price to ride a special bus to work that anyone else in the county would pay to take public transportation, anywhere.  To get more people working, the county agreed.

FEL and the Union also agreed to allow the company to subsidize the transportation, if bus scripts were sold to the employees to recover most of the cost.  We now had a workable plan.

FEL had locations outside of Farmingdale that were also struggling with staffing issues. The satellite office in Asbury Park with the county transportation component would help meet their hiring needs, as well.  The planning and scheduling would include those business sites, too.

The first few bus runs hit some snags.  Buses were often late and production could not start on time.  It seemed that some drivers were sympathetic to the complaints and requests of new employees and waited for them when they did not arrive at the designated pickup zones on time. We had to make it clear to everyone involved that our departure and arrival times were cast in stone - no exceptions.  There could be no delays and anyone causing them on a regularl would be terminated from employment or contract, including offending bus drivers and the operators employing them.

In a very short time, we had numerous busses running between Asbury Park and Farmingdale, Tinton Falls and Holmdel on all shifts with hundreds of employees taking the ride. Things seemed good - but there were new and difficult problems to deal with. Many of FELs long term employees were white.  The newest employees were mostly urban blacks.  Change takes time...