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Sony fills temporary positions locally
Gone are the days when Sony's employment agency would seek temporary workers from Baltimore; Cleveland; Youngstown, Ohio, and Erie to fill the Sony Technology Center-Pittsburgh's needs for workers to help fill demand for TVs during the holidays and afterward.
Staffmark, a Little Rock, Ark.-employment agency, has hired about 415 temporary workers from throughout Southwestern Pennsylvania to fill a variety of production jobs at the Sony plant in East Huntingdon, and anticipates hiring between 200 and 300 more workers, said Anthony Valentin, Staffmark corporate director accounts.
"We hope to achieve that (employment goal) by the end of the month," Valentin said.
The fulltime temporary production jobs pay between $8 to $13.50 per hour, with shift differential, overtime and double the hourly rate for more than 60 hours of work a week, Valentin said. He anticipates that many of the jobs will last longer than the peak production season, which may stretch into January or February.
Sony's only television assembly plant in the United States has about 2,200 full-time workers, 600 seasonal workers, and 500 temporary workers, Michael L. Koff, Sony spokesman, said Friday.
Staffmark, which pays the workers' wages and benefits under a three-year contract with Sony, has attracted applicants by listing the jobs with the state's PA CareerLink centers and through job fairs in Greensburg, Forest Hills, McKeesport, Monroeville, Pittsburgh, Somerset and Uniontown.
Recruiting seems to have picked up, said Koff, who was confident the region's labor force will fill the demand for seasonal workers.
Deborah Ann Morgan, 45, of McKees Rocks, landed a job at Sony when she went to Staffmark's job fair Monday at the Palisades in McKeesport. She was part of a steady stream of about 45 applicants yesterday who were seeking jobs at Sony.
Morgan was unemployed when she walked in, but after undergoing the application process, she was hired for a production job that will begin next week.
In order to get to Sony's plant from McKees Rocks, Morgan said she will make the trip by bus, one operated by the Port Authority Transit and the other by Staffmark, which will take Pittsburgh residents to the plant.
Staffmark conceivably could fulfill all of Sony's needs for temporary workers without ever leaving Westmoreland County. There were 9,400 jobless workers in Westmoreland County in August, and the pool of job applicants at the PA CareerLink Westmoreland County office in Youngwood, less than three miles from the plant, was 4,800, according to state figures.
The agency does not have to find as many seasonal employees for Sony this year as did Sony's previous employment agency, Aerotek Commercial Staffing of Hanover, Md., which had to find about 1,700 seasonal employees. An Aerotek spokesman could not be reached for comment.
Sony reduced the number of temporary workers it has used in the past by creating a new job classification, that of seasonal workers who are Sony Corp. employees, Koff said.
Based on last year's experience, Sony learned that the area's job market would be able to supply about 1,200 temporary workers, Koff said.
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