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6. The Life and Death of Seymour Specialty Wire Seymour Specialty Wire was widely celebrated as the largest and most democratically structured 100 percent employee-owned industrial buyout in the United States. But from its inception, problems were apparent. For seven years, the company continued to produce and sell specialty brass products, but business difficulties and internal conflicts loomed ever larger. After several years in the red, the company went into bankruptcy. In 1993, its assets were auctioned off for the benefit of its creditors. Its problems were rooted both in the historical legacy of the old company and in the global economic context into which the new company was launched. Upstairs, Downstairs The Seymour Manufacturing Company was founded in 1878 by the ­ Matthies family and their associates. Although it was formally a corporation, like most Naugatuck Valley brass companies it remained dominated by individual families well into the twentieth century. Members of the Matthies family served in top management, as well as retaining large blocks of stock, until the company was sold to Bridgeport Brass in 1950. Initially at the Seymour Manufacturing Company, as throughout American industry, skilled manual workers possessed the crucial knowledge necessary for production and directed much of the production process. In the early 1980s, I was given a vivid picture of earlier days in an interview with three retired workers who collectively had worked at Seymour for more than a hundred years and some of whose fathers had started working there before World War I. Frank Pochron, a retired manager who started at Seymour in 1936, recalled that “years ago they didn’t have all this equipment to check out what you were doing. They relied upon the people to do it. Years ago it seemed the operators had the technicalities, were proud of their work and able to do their jobs, what the customer demanded and the shop wanted.” But all that began to change as American industrialists tried to redesign the work process to concentrate knowledge and authority in a management cadre whose job was to tell manual workers how to do their work. Pochron described the impact at Seymour: “Now you are directed what to do. It seems the operators wait for management to tell them what to do and if it doesn’t come out right, so what?”1 To ensure that the deskilled workers would actually work, production standards were set for each job. Sam Kwochka, who started working at Seymour in 1935and retired in 1979, still recalled that if you met the standards, “you were entitled to stay on till layoff. But if you faltered below a hundred percent, out the door you went.”2 Workers responded to the restructured work process with a twofold strategy . First, they developed informal shop-floor tactics for controlling the pace of work and resisting management pressure. Retired Seymour worker John Chubat recalled, “They would time me; I would work normal, just like I’ve always been doing. But when they’re not there, instead of shearing it in one or two pieces, I can shear four or five. It’s my own ingenuity.” This and the many other techniques workers developed to control the pace of work were backed up by norms set by informal work groups. As Sam Kwochka recalled, “They would tell them man-to-man what to expect and what not to exceed.”3 Along with these informal methods, Seymour workers developed unionism . Seymour Manufacturing was the first company to go out during the great Naugatuck Valley general strike of 1919, probably because Russians and Poles, who were early promoters of the strike, predominated in the Seymour workforce. Union organization was thereafter effectively suppressed from 1920 until World War II. Establishment of the union marked a major shift in power at Seymour. Eddie Labacz, former president of the union at Seymour, recalled, “Once the union won the election, they told the company, ‘If you fire anybody, we’re all going to walk out.’ So the company figured there was no use firing anybody for being active in the union.” Following a pattern typical in the brass industry well into the twentieth century, Seymour’s top managers hired foremen who ruled their sections of the mill more or less as personal fiefdoms, with more or less arbitrary power to hire, fire, and command their own workers.4 The foremen’s authority only gradually yielded to a more modern managerial concept in which foremen, Life and Death of Seymour Specialty Wire...

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