Area manufacturers share wages, benefits in survey [Dayton Daily News, Ohio]

Dec. 30--DAYTON -- An entry-level welder can earn $13 to $15.09 an hour at Dayton-area manufacturers with 76 or more employees. A master welder can make up to $21.53.

A master toolmaker can earn up to $20.60 an hour at a similarly sized manufacturer in the Dayton area.

More than 90 percent of manufacturers offer employees health insurance of some kind. And while most pay their workers for clean-up time, most won't pay them for lunch breaks.

Those facts and more are in the Dayton Region Manufacturers Association's 2011 Employee Wage and Benefits Survey.

The survey, distributed to Dayton-area manufacturing companies, gathers data on business demographics, employee wages and benefits, work schedules, recruiting and retention strategies and more, letting employers compare their policies to competitors and peers in the region.

"What we do find each year is that employers are keenly interested in benchmarking what they're doing compared to the local industry," said Angelia Erbaugh, president of DRMA (formerly the Dayton Tooling and Manufacturing Association).

The survey is conducted through Manpower, an employee placement and data collection firm.

The 2011 survey is available to DRMA members for $175, to nonmembers for $250 and to the firms which participated in the survey at no cost. This year, 112 Dayton-area firms participated.

Tom Maher, owner of the Dayton Manpower franchise, found that many of the survey's results confirmed what industry watchers have long seen: That employees with the right skills -- particularly computer programming and machine set-up skills -- can be difficult to find.

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(c)2011 the Dayton Daily News (Dayton, Ohio)

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