Are packaging jobs secure? (sidebar)

This special report is based on 86 end-user questionnaires selected from responses to a November 2001 survey conducted on Packaging World’s Web site, Packworld.com. The respondents came primarily from the food (27%), nonfood consumer products (18.8%), and the medical and pharmaceutical areas (14.1%). Other businesses with high representation were beverages (12.9%) and industrial products (11.7%). At these companies, respondents most often held engineering titles (27.9%), followed by management (16.2%), packaging (15.1%), production (10.4%), and purchasing (8.1%). There was good representation of various company sizes. Although more than 48% worked at companies with 500 or fewer employees, 28.2% were employed by companies with 2ꯠ or more employees. The balance of respondents came from companies between those sizes. Three regional areas were predominant among respondents. The Midwest had 32.9% of participants, the Northeast 17.6%, and the West or Northwest 15.2%. Just over 10% of respondents came from Canada and Mexico.