New Owners of Steel Foundry Determined to Get the Job Done : Rust Belt: Workers staged 42-day sit-in to win right to buy bankrupt plant after it closed. They cite the ‘C-word,’ commitment.

Look closely inside the aging steel foundry here, where metal ingots are molded by orange furnace flames, and you’ll find a different kind of mill.

Crews in hard hats and steel-toed shoes routinely work extra hours and on weekends, without overtime, to get the job done. In fact, the time clock was burned to show the workers they are people, not numbers.

And the company president and chief executive officer sometimes dons his mill gear to shovel raw materials. This CEO still pays union dues and was a union president less than a year ago.

“We’re talking about the C-word. Commitment,” said plant manager Tom Alcaro, supervising a four-man crew working overtime without pay to prepare a mold for the next day’s shift.

Things are done differently at Sharpsville Quality Products because the workers are the owners, or at least they own 53% of it. And they had to stage a 42-day sit-in to bring it back from the death of bankruptcy.

“It was a matter of survival. We’re willing to do whatever it takes to make this place go,” said CEO Jeff Swogger, the youngest of 19 children of a father who once brought home a paycheck from this same gritty foundry.

Smokestack shutdowns have been a familiar story in the Shenango Valley, a ribbon of the Rust Belt along the Pennsylvania-Ohio border which has lost thousands of manufacturing jobs since the 1980s.

But at Sharpsville, workers refused to walk away when the plant’s previous owner gave three days’ notice that it would close on March 5, 1993, despite two wage concessions by the United Steelworkers local that represented employees.

When the final shift ended at 3 p.m. on that rainy Friday, there was no gloom and doom, just an air of upbeat determination when Swogger announced the workers were staying.

Convinced they could run the plant at a profit, workers camped inside the mill gate, setting up tents in the chill and refusing to leave until they could get a selling price to buy the place. They sat tight for 42 days, making sure none of the vital machinery inside was sold for scrap.

“We had seen plant after plant being shuttered, and everybody was walking away and quitting,” said Swogger, 37. “We didn’t want our community to be ravaged anymore. It came to the point where somebody had to stand up. We weren’t going to go away without a fight.”

The rebels endured a blizzard and chilly spring rains, gathering around fire barrels and living off food and coffee donated by townspeople, many of whom either worked at the plant or knew somebody who did.

The sit-in was illegal. But the Mercer County sheriff and district attorney, who depend on the voters for their jobs, said they wouldn’t evict them as long as everything remained peaceful.

Finally, a selling price was set at $1.28 million.

“I had 15 cents in my pocket, so we were only $1,279,999.85 short,” said Swogger.

But Swogger and his workers had some unflagging allies, especially the Rev. Art Fuller of the First Baptist Church. Fuller formed a committee of local churches--Catholics, Pentecostals and Baptists, black and white--to begin passing the plate for donations.

“We put ourselves on the line for this from the beginning. We just believed that we could do it. That’s what faith is, calling into being things that are not. That’s why we didn’t quit,” said Fuller.

At the same time, workers dug into their own pockets, peddled T-shirts and sold raffle tickets at weekly rallies. In one show of solidarity called the Rally for the Valley, they formed a human chain nearly five miles long to link shuttered factories from Sharon, Pa., to Youngstown, Ohio.

All of the donations went into a fund called ANB, which stands for “A New Beginning.” In two months, ANB had raised $250,000.

The town of Sharpsville, with 7,000 residents, pledged money because it was faced with the loss of $63,000 in annual taxes if its only industry and largest employer folded.

And loans came from the state, the Small Business Administration, the United Steelworkers of America and private investors--the largest of which is Joseph Richey of Management Partnerships International, an investment group in Batavia, Ill.

“Sharpsville is a symbol of workers saying enough is enough,” said Leo Gerard, secretary-treasurer of the steelworkers’ union. “The role of this union has been to be much more than a collective-bargaining agent. It’s saving jobs and creating jobs.”

The deal was done on Christmas Eve in 1993. Two months later, the new employee-owned company poured its first mold, and the community turned out in celebration to smash a bottle of champagne against the first steel ingots.

“It was a miracle,” said Jeffrey Burns, who has worked at the foundry for 20 years and helped achieve the employee buyout. “If someone would have told me five years ago we’d be doing this, I’d have told them they were crazy.”

With the fiery ovens reignited, the foundry shipped its first product on March 4 last year--a year after the workers began their desperate takeover when their jobs were given up for dead.

“If anything in life was impossible, this was it,” Swogger said. “Nobody gave us a chance. We had an old decrepit plant, declining market, terrible economy, we were in bankruptcy. All the odds were against us. But we overcame every obstacle. We absolutely refused to take no for an answer.

“What did we have to lose? We had already lost our jobs,” said the blue-eyed, deep-voiced Swogger, whose mustache matches his shaggy brown hair. “All we were looking for was an opportunity to control our own destiny. Then it would be up to us to make it work. We were saying that we had problems, and it was up to us to fix them.”

Not that there weren’t start-up problems for foundry workers who had worked a lifetime under someone else’s direction but now found themselves in charge.

The company--SQP, as it is known--brought in a management team to run the shop. But the president was fired in August for spending too much money on new product development at a time when the company was still in debt. So the board of directors turned to Swogger as the new boss, and things have improved.

“There had been so much failure and collapse, it’s almost unbelievable that workers could draw a line in the sand and say we’re going to save our jobs,” said Joe Bute of the Steel Valley Authority, a Pittsburgh-based organization founded by former steelworkers to save manufacturing jobs.

“We usually don’t get something at the end of the rainbow,” Bute added.

Like the ANB, the Steel Valley Authority hopes to set up a contingency fund that can be used to help workers save their jobs by buying struggling industries, with SQP as a model.

“Once we make Sharpsville work, we can teach others about the importance of employee ownership,” said Swogger. He, Fuller and Burns put up their own houses and other possessions as collateral for SQP’s loans. “Who knows more about a plant, and is committed for the long haul, than the people who work there?”

The foundry employs 83 people, down from the 220-member work force under the previous owners, and the wage and benefits package is about half of the $26 an hour it once was. It’s a union shop, but workers often stay after hours or come in on weekends to do needed chores.

The plant carries a heavy long-term debt, but is making enough money to pay its day-to-day operating expenses and debt payments. It is no longer in bankruptcy (the sale wiped the slate clean). Costs are down, sales are expected to improve this year, and Swogger and his colleagues are confident.

“It was a meat grinder. But when you get kicked in the teeth, you have to wipe the blood off, say that one hurt, and you keep going,” Swogger said. “We’re going to make it. Guaranteed. We can’t let this one fail. We’ve worked too doggone hard.”