Tom Tredway is vice president of Sales at Erie Molded Plastics, a custom injection molding facility located in Erie, Pennsylvania. Today, the company has 21 presses, more than 50 employees, and supplies part to a variety of industries, including packaging, housewares, electronics and pharmaceuticals. For more information, visit www.eriemolded.com.
As employers, we often find ourselves concentrating so intensely on running our businesses that we often overlook the need to really talk to our employees about the challenges we face. Unless we educate them, most of our team members may be clueless about the burdensome regulations and policies that can impact our bottom line, our economy and our future.
Times have changed, and today we need to be more modern in not only how we operate our businesses but also how we engage our employees. Think about it as you would any other employee training you do as a company such as workplace safety, quality control, diversity and ethics. Education is what it is all about — inspiring our team members to be well-educated citizens. If we don’t step up our efforts, who will?
As a local employer and member of the Manufacturer & Business Association (MBA), Erie Molded Plastics, Inc. is proud to help preserve the American Dream by helping our employees become better informed, involved and inspired citizens. And we’re doing this by actively participating in the Job Creators Network CEO leader and Employer to Employee (E2E) education program.
This new, MBA-supported program is extremely simple and easy to use and an effective way to educate our employees about what’s going in Harrisburg and Washington. It has informational and entertaining videos and other materials that explain how government policies affect our ability to create and maintain jobs as well as our employees’ jobs, paychecks, benefits and their families.
The Job Creators Network is a nonpartisan organization founded by entrepreneurs like Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus. He believes, as we do, that economic freedom in our country is in jeopardy because government policies are breaking the backs of business owners, just like you and I, and hurting our hard-working employees.
What really impresses me is that this group strongly supports the right of every employee to empower themselves with as much public policy information as possible and, more importantly, the right of every individual to think for themselves and make their own private decisions regarding what to do with that information. It does not and will not endorse candidates, political parties or partisan organizations created to advance the election of candidates.
As a small manufacturer seeking to effect positive change, I encourage you to visit www.mbausa.org/information-station to familiarize yourself with this exciting program. I hope you will watch and share the videos and all the other resources it offers with your employees, colleagues, friends, families and neighbors.
I strongly believe that we have an obligation to make sure that our employees are just as informed about government policies as the people who write and enact them, and I hope you will seriously consider taking part in this new education program in your workplace.
Together, we can and will defend economic freedom and preserve the American Dream for succeeding generations!
