The Citizens Voice November 14, 2007
Tobyhanna Army Depot has 350 immediate job openings
Just months after it reached an all-time high in employment, Tobyhanna Army Depot is tapping again into the labor pool.
By James Haggerty
The Monroe County facility, which surpassed 5,000 employees this summer, is hiring about 130 people to handle an increasing work volume and plans to fill another 220 positions before the new year, spokesman Kevin Toolan said.
“We have an ongoing need and it’s very urgent now to fill several hundred positions,” Toolan said.
Tobyhanna, which repairs and recalibrates U.S. military electronics apparatus ranging from hand-held radios to satellites and night-vision gear, is hiring workers principally in electronics, Toolan said, along with electricians, painters, electroplaters and sheet metal workers.
“We want to get these positions filled by the end of the year,” he said.
The depot’s work force jumped from 4,163 in September 2006 to 5,090 in June. Workers there handled 325,000 pieces of equipment in fiscal 2006, up from 280,000 pieces the preceding year, and the volume is expected to increase another 15 percent this year, Toolan said.
The U.S. defense budget doubled to $600 billion over the last five years, and areas such as Northeastern Pennsylvania that have concentrations of military-oriented installations and industries are seeing the benefits, said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a defense policy think tank in Alexandria, Va.
“Times are rough in some parts of the county, and for other parts of the country it’s a good war, and that’s the simple truth,” Pike said.
Facilities such as Tobyhanna are thriving because electronics material is essential in battlefield situations, Pike said.
“They do repairs, and there’s lots of stuff out there that’s getting dropped and banged up and clogged with dust,” he said. “A lot of this stuff in peacetime is just going to be sitting in the storeroom.”
In addition to the new hires, Tobyhanna is seeking 50 to 70 applicants for temporary and short-term deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan of up to one year.
Tobyhanna expects to hire “a couple hundred more” people after the new year, Toolan said, and full-time employment is likely to exceed 5,500.
Permanent hires in electronics at Tobyhanna earn salaries of $33,000 to $46,000 and industrial trade jobs pay from $33,000 to $38,000. Information about the jobs and applications are available at www.tobyhanna.army.mil.
© Copyright 2007, The Citizens Voice
