Word: plant
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Happy Investors For Atlanta's Noel and Kathy Wadsworth, investing in art is a full-time occupation. Last April, Wadsworth, 43, sold his thriving 20-year-old carpet plant in Dalton, Ga., in order to concentrate on what had been the couple's consuming interest: collecting French and American impressionists. "We've always been interested in art, and we'd always bought local artists," he explains. "Then, five or six years ago, we just had a yearning for artists who were names in books, fine art, artists who were dead...
...with TRW Defense and Space Systems Group near Los Angeles. The young man's duties included handling coded messages from the CIA about spy satellites. He worked in a room called the Black Vault, off limits to all but half a dozen TRW employees. The group found plant security so lax that they spent their days getting drunk on booze smuggled in via a CIA pouch, mixing daiquiris in a document shredder and selling Amway household products over the secure telephone line. Chris was sometimes sober enough to be appalled by the messages he was handling...
...nine months after the new employee-owned company, Republic Hose Manufacturing Corp., took over the one-story plant, productivity is up 40%, and the rate of rejected products has dropped from 8% to 1%. The firm, which today employs 130, estimates that for its first complete fiscal year it will earn a pretax profit of up to $600,000 on revenues of $7 million; that is less than the approximately $12 million in revenues of Aeroquip's final year but at least double the new owners' initial projections...
Officers at Aeroquip were skeptical when the Youngstown employees presented their plan to buy the plant, but they agreed to sell if the buyers could pay the $2.5 million price. Frank Ciarniello, head of the United Rubber Workers local and a machine operator at the plant, and William Hawkins, then a general foreman and now vice president for operations, persuaded C.C. ("Pete") Broadwater, Aeroquip's manager of hose operations, to quit his job and join the new company as chairman and president. Aided by the Ohio Public Interest Campaign, a group that works to encourage business development, and Youngstown...
Aeroquip sold the plant because, of ficials said, it was too costly to run. By installing two new boilers, Broadwater trimmed utility bills 80%, to $200,000 annually. Other changes were more painful. The number of salaried employees was reduced to 16 from 50, and the top six managers took a combined pay cut of $71,000 a year. With union support, Broadwater dropped hourly wages to a flat $5, from as much as $6.50. Paid holidays fell to eight from twelve. Vacations, which had averaged five to six weeks annually, were reduced and dropped altogether for the first year...