A sewing or pattern making test shouldn’t trip either the “medical” or “objective” part.

In addition, the ADA only applies to companies with 15 or more employees. (I believe that if you provide “public accommodations” such as retail stores, dining, etc. there are some provisions that do apply.) Micro-employers have more flexibility with this set of regulations.

To avoid violating the Americans With Disabilities Act, don’t ask an applicant about his or her medical history and don’t conduct any medical exam before you make a job offer.

Once you decide to offer the applicant a job, you can make the offer conditional on the applicant passing a medical exam. Just be sure you require the exam for all entering employees who are doing the same job. If you only require people whom you believe or know to have disabilities to take the exam, you will be violating the Americans With Disabilities Act.

From nolo.

Actually, the way I understood it (I’m no lawyer, I only learned this at a labor law seminar), you can’t test them until you have offered them the job. There is a fine legal line between hiring and offering. Basically, the offer is made contingent on them demonstrating some competency. The catch is that if they complete it, you have already offered the job and it is therefore up to them to accept it. If you wait until you hire them to test competency, now you must terminate them (with all the repercussions involved). If you test before the offer, you may be up against some kind of discrimination claim. If you actually offer the job contingent on the outcome of the test, the discrimination claim is tougher to make because you did actually offer a job and they failed an objective test.

That is a key component of the test: it must be objective, and it should also be relevant to the job. You probably can’t ask stitchers to parallel park a gasoline tanker.

I have been contacting local government offices, takes some itme getting to the right people, whatever. Also, yeah, not an apparel manufacturing center, meaning no garment district, can just run out the door and get a bunch of zippers, buttons, fabrics, etc. same day at wholesale. Toronto and Chicago are only 4hrs away though and we have a good community out here we can car/hotel pool together.

We have a large Mexican and Eastern European popultion here, have barely tapped into that, but did come up with a guy, but we got him in a little early and had to lay him off. Felt HORRIBLE! Want to avoid that, at the very least by setting up contractual workers. And reading in the book, I was comforted by the industry job description chapter, sewing production should be error free if following all the other steps.

Thanks for being there, Kathleen and co.!

Or autistic! I think at least 25% of sewing operators are and maybe half the pattern makers .

Many skilled sewers left the profession when piecework rates where eroded. They found work in other fields paid as much, if not more, than apparel manufacturing. It will take some effort to attract them back. In addition, you will need to retrain a large portion.To what degree you will need to retrain depends on how long they were out of the industry, level of skill etc..

I would imagine the State of Michigan has funding for retraining of workers in many fields. You should definitely pursue this avenue. Apparel manufacturing in Toronto(3.5 hrs east) used to be the second largest manufacturing industry 15 years ago. It now is around 6 or 7 th. Perhaps funding is available at a municipal level as well.I know the City of Toronto has an Apparel Developement Section and job creation is a priority.

I agree with Mike about paying more for experienced people. If allowed, one or two of these more experienced workers eventually may be counted on to assist in training even more people you bring aboard.

When you are in a city where there are pockets of manufacturing, typically some part of the city government is dedicated to keeping work there and provides financial incentives to small businesses in that industry.

In the absence of this, you end up with a more general city or county government office (or non profit) dedicated to helping skilled trade workers find work. Sometimes they focus on something very specific, like construction, and sometimes they focus on skilled trade in general.

Non profits often provide financial assistance (i.e. subsidies) to help businesses afford the cost of hiring the displaced workers, especially when the worker usually makes substantially more than minimum wage and has trouble getting their fair wage in their local economy.

So what I would do is call around. Start with the chamber of commerce, the economic development department, and other organizations and tell them your story. Get the word our and one lead will lead to another. You may find that there are programs to help you afford the cost of brining in employes, ESPECIALLY, when you can bring in someone who is technically “disabled” but still physically able to perform the job (for example, someone who is color blind, or someone with a slight hearing impairment).