machine operator

forklift operator

senior machine operator

operator

senior maintenance person

Liberty Diversified International

Wow. Where to start... Look, I am not one to complain about employers, but this place has got to be the most poorly run business I have ever seen. Now to be fair a lot has to do with some serious changes. Change in ownership. A new plant. Moving across town. A lot of new employees. And limited guidance or vision from the parent company. However, the buck stops here. The culture overall is rather toxic. Many people just don't seem to care or take pride in anything. The safety culture is severely lacking. The safety manager is frequently battling inertia stemming, in part, from the fact that this place has never really had a safety program to speak of and the plant leadership has treated safety as less than an afterthought. From what I understand, this is an industry-wide problem in many ways. Apparently the corrugated industry is waaaay behind the curve in modernization and safety culture. The parent company, LDI, bought this place about 3 years ago. LDI didn't even have a corporate safety program until about 6 years ago. The plant I work for has never really done much of anything to do with safety until rather recently. The move to the new plant has been sloppy and chaotic. The right hand never knows what the left hand is doing. There is very little communication up and down the chain and there is a severe lack of leadership at every level. 

Now the good - I want to leave this on a positive note. Most of the people are pleasant. For every operator or worker that says no one cares, there are five people who do. The office gals are especially kind and capable. HR and Finance are doing their best. Hour workers get a lot of overtime. Which is good or bad depending on whether you value work-life balance or financial incentive more. Salaried employees are essentially left alone to operate independently and there is a good deal of flexibility in setting hours. 
 
Overall, a few efforts to improve communication and leadership could really save the culture here and improve safety, efficiency, and productivity.

Tons of overtime. So much many would say it’s too much. 50+ hour weeks are very common and I even clocked two 80+ Hour weeks during my time there. 

Maintenance applicants will be given a test that they expect you to do poorly on. Depending on the score you get you may qualify for a higher pay grade. IF YOU SCORE WELL DO NOT LET THEM TALK YOU INTO “STARTING” AT A LOWER PAY GRADE! Once you’re hired your score doesn’t matter and you’ll have to go through 2+years of internal online courses per pay grade to progress. They won’t let you test out of these courses either.

(If you don’t care about the test just skip this bit) The test is mostly(~60%) questions that anyone who knows their way around maintenance could answer but the other 40% will be more esoteric stuff specific to box making and a couple trick questions for good measure. These will cover things like terms for used when talking about parts of boxes, (Flanges, scoring lines, etc) the corrugating process and corrugated product terms/measurements. Those will be things like the differences between Flute sizes, relative crush strength between flute sizes, paper weight, double and triple walling processes, the steps in the construction of corrugated etc. it’s all stuff you can learn from a quick browse of Wikipedia.  

Management was better than some places I’ve seen but they still had problems. Part orders were commonly delayed or denied due to “budget concerns.” They also have a habit of expensing production purchases on the maintenance budget so we would commonly go over budget and have projects delayed. PMs we’re commonly delayed for the sake of production to the point that most of your time each day is spent urgently fighting fires rather than casually preventing them.

Like any other job, there were some pro's and some con's.  The pay was decent and the benefits were pretty competitive (health, vision, dental, paid STD/LTD, paid life, 401k, PTO, profit sharing so overall a nice package.  Typical work day for managers was 7a - 5p for management.  They say they promote work, life balance but that's a lot of lip service.  They always wanted more and more and you spend a lot of time on calls and can't get the real work done.  Plant Manager couldn't run a lemonade stand.  There's a lot of micro management from the Corp. level down, so beware of that.   Even worse that some of the senior managers and plant managers were nothing but suck ups to the owners.  They talked a good game but lacked substance. The company does place a lot of emphasis on giving back to the community but it seemed a little excessive.  They do a lot of workplace surveys, etc. but not a lot of action on those findings.  Just a lot of glorious planning with artificial actions.  The company seems to have lost some of its appeal as a truly family owned, family ran business to more of a fortune 500 culture.  

Overall, this is a good place to work. Many of the employees are friendly and experienced in factory settings, the maintenance department is skilled and responds quickly to issues on the floor to keep everything running smoothly, and many of the mid-level support staff are great to work with as well.
Where the issues start is with upper management and HR. The payscale is confusing/nonexistent, promotions are rare, raises are even more hard to come by, and on top of everything else most of the higher-level decisions are being made by people that are not in the building or spend any amount of time around the shop floor employees. There is almost zero transparency when various business decisions are made and the ones that people are made away of are almost never explained so you really don't know what the company's overall goals are.
There is a mountain of talent in this facility, but most of it is untapped and thrown to the wayside in favor of chasing corporate goal that don't benefit the majority of employees.

 I work 29 plus  years , There  .. They talk a big game  about being  a family  and caring  about  employee's .. I had 3 incidents  in 2 months  , 2 I disputed   ,  The 3rd no excuses  my fault  100% ... My supervisor  and all the people  I worked  with were sorry  to see me go . I was on call even  up to the day I was let go   , they need  me to come  in early   I was there  ..   I was given  a award  by Penske for driver of the year  , my coworkers  still  want  me back middle managers  want  me back ,  I upset the powers that be , I reached  out to apologize , I don't  even  if they  got it ??  That's  why  I say they  talk a big game  but are out of touch  what is really  happening  on a day   to day basis  ..  I had a great  run 29 years  was much more of a asset than a liability  , but the powers  than be thought  differently  . I wish  them all well   , and would  go back in a second  of they would  let me ..  All and it's  a decent  place  to work  I just  wish the shot callers were more compassionate to long term Employee's  .. 😔 

The owners are liars and reward those who also lie.  Most of the employees are scared of the owners because they are so well known in the business community and think they will prevent them from getting a new job if they leave.  Most of the people who do leave won't tell anybody where they are going for exactly this reason.  Think about why that would happen before you apply.  The owners are also verbally abusive but the older employees take it because they know they can't go anyplace else.  Newer employees just walk out the door.  If you're willing to take the abuse and tell the owners they're right all the time though you can stay until you retire (results are not important in this culture).  The focus is always on the past.  Lots of Saturdays and Sundays.

There's a reason why this place has a hard time hiring and keeping employees. Poor working conditions (it gets hot and dusty), poor upper management (no sense of work/life balance for employees) and strict production quotas. Expect bodily aches and pains working here. New employees where I worked, only get only 5 days of vacation their first year, which is UNPAID. There is a chance of 10-12-hour workdays depending on business needs and that overtime isn't over "until further notice." Plenty of opportunities to learn different machines because people are constantly quitting or moving to other departments. Look elsewhere. This place isn't worth your time and effort. Pays ok, but not worth the trouble. I've been gone from there for over a year now and am much happier where I'm at.

Everyday was a mess. They put a lot of stress on you, give you tons of work and manager tells them not to pay you for your hard work. They hire new managers who are lost, and get rid of you when you were there doing so much for the company in every dept even HR duties, safety duties, orientations, and involved with staffing agencies and the list goes on, just to replace you with people who haven’t been there one year and never did as much as you did throughout the years. They are not fair. Don’t waste your time. It’s a constant cycle. So after doing everything for them, they let a new manager who was not there long( 1 year ) and replace with a new hire who barely did anything at all. 

The Liberty Plastics division is toxic. In the last two years they eliminated the positions of a quarter of their Golden Valley staff. The “corporate office” of LP now consists of 4 upper level managers and 6 employees.  The remaining employees work in a culture of fear that includes rumors of age bias, anonymous surveys that are not anonymous, and ignored ethics complaints.

Performance reviews are not strictly enforced by LDI and are ultimately meaningless, as their go-to at Liberty Plastics is eliminating positions rather than managing people. Merit based pay is not a thing. 

Overall, LDI as a whole is not recommended and the Golden Valley location specifically should be avoided.

get everyone going on machines first thing in the morning and make sure they get orders out on time some computer work to keep up with production at least once a week do an invetory to make sure i got what i need to get diffrent jobs done and if not make sure they get ordered.How to oprerate and get things done in prodution.we have all new management so still getting use to there ways.the team i have is great they work hard and keep up with production.is alway training new temps because this is a hard hot job and some people are not cut out for it.the time i work is great(5am to 1pm)

Top Job Titles	Average Salary
Machine operator 91 salaries reported	$21.66 per hour
Forklift operator 85 salaries reported	$20.86 per hour
Senior machine operator 68 salaries reported	$20.86 per hour
Operator 24 salaries reported	$23.95 per hour
Senior maintenance person 18 salaries reported	$28.86 per hour

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