An American comeback for manufacturing
From his vantage point in Westchester County”™s business community, Leonard “Len” Vallender saw his industry neglected for years and all but disappear as the county remade its economy in an office-park sprawl of corporate headquarters.
At Fenbar Precision Machinists Inc. in Thornwood, Vallender, the company”™s president and sole owner, saw small manufacturing neighbors close up on Commerce Street in the ”™80s and ”™90s. Local customers for Fenbar”™s machined products and machinery repairs, such as IBM, General Foods and Nestle, relocated or reduced production operations in the county. “A lot of our customers moved away,” he said.
Watching Westchester business leaders and politicians promote economic development, “They don”™t do anything for manufacturing,” he said. “They do it for restaurants, they do it for medical. I guess it”™s harder with manufacturing.”
Having served for about nine years on the Westchester-Putnam Workforce Investment Board, Vallender watched as job training programs and federal grant funds were directed to various industries. “We did hospitality. We did biotech. We”™re going to make all the buildings green,” he said. But manufacturing was largely ignored as an area of the economy that could spur job growth here.
“I”™m saying, ”˜You”™re not putting 20 million people back to work in this country. The jobs aren”™t there. There”™s no manufacturing.”™”
“If you want jobs, you”™re not getting them all cutting grass. You”™ve got to go back to manufacturing.”
Now Vallender sees signs that Westchester leaders increasingly share his view. And some of Fenbar”™s globally distributed customers are bringing back their outsourced manufacturing operations to the U.S. Manufacturing has begun to get the attention it deserves as the historical mainstay of the Hudson Valley and national economy, in Vallender”™s view.
Trained as an engineer and the son of an immigrant tool and die maker in Mount Vernon, Vallender was 26 when he bought an interest in Fenbar in 1968. He moved the company from Valhalla, where it started in 1954, to its current location in Thornwood in 1979. The company has grown from a two-man or three-man shop to one with 13 employees and dozens of manually operated and computer-controlled machines that span a roughly 40-year history of declining employment and rising productivity in American manufacturing.
On one of Fenbar”™s $180,000 computerized machines, “The work we do today, if we did that with the old equipment of the ”˜80s and before, you would need 30 or 40 employees” to operate, Vallender said. For a part that would have taken three machinists working 11 minutes to make, “We make the part completely in 45 seconds today” with computerized equipment. “It turns all day, through lunch, doesn”™t take breaks.”
The conversion to computer-controlled machine tools in the ”™80s “really changed the whole industry,” he said. “Through the ”™80s and ”™90s, we had a complete technological change. The technology from 1990 to today has just exploded.”
With that explosion, “What we did was we took all the (manufacturing) work and sent it out of the country.” Vallender said the U.S. has lost more than 40,000 machine shops in roughly the last decade.
In his early years at Fenbar, “We worked just locally, right around here,” he said. Though corporate giants in Westchester such as PepsiCo and IBM remain customers, “Now we ship parts all over the world. No more factories are here.” Duracell, a metal-stamping customer with which Fenbar worked in the ”™70s to develop the first lithium batteries, relocated and later sold off its manufacturing division in North Carolina.
At his Thornwood business, though, Vallender recently has seen what industry analysts and investors also have observed. “Right now, a lot of my customers are bringing everything back into the country” after outsourcing to China and other low-cost countries. President Obama and industry insiders have called it the start of a manufacturing renaissance in America.
Vallender said customers are returning to the U.S. because their foreign production costs have gone up and the quality of outsourced production “is far from stellar.” Delivery times are another factor in the reverse exodus of manufacturers. “If he”™s going to China” to place an order, “he has to do it six months before,” Vallender said. “I can do it in two to three weeks, hopefully.”
“The textile industry is not coming back here,” he said. But the aircraft and gun industries and heavy equipment manufacturers such as Caterpillar are again opening plants in America.
A resurgence of manufacturing will require government and private companies to invest in employee training, he said. That has been absent since the federal government eliminated a four-year apprenticeship program that combined academic and factory training for manufacturing employees.
“I can”™t take a kid off the street and put him in here” on a machine, Vallender said. “OSHA (the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration) kills me” if a worker is injured or does not wear proper safety equipment on the job.
Serving on the Westchester Community College advisory committee, “I”™ve been fighting for years that math, design and materials and safety be taught in school,” Vallender said. “But they weren”™t getting the students, because in Westchester everyone wants to work on Wall Street.”
That has changed in the four years since the worst recession in U.S. history left millions of both white-collar and blue-collar workers unemployed. Now college graduates are applying for machinist jobs at Fenbar, he said.
The recession left $500,000 of customers”™ finished products on shelves in the Thornwood plant, but the debt-free business survived, and without layoffs, doing repair work when “nobody was buying new.” As for the unclaimed customer orders, “Now I”™m selling it to them again,” Vallender said.
Representing the manufacturing sector on the bi-county workforce investment board, he is overseeing a $33,600 federal grant awarded this year for training in advanced manufacturing. Fenbar and two of its customers in the county, Curtis Instruments and BASF Corp., will send employees to Westchester Community College for courses that start this summer. Vallender has sent letters offering the training to 40 other companies in the area.
“That”™s what we”™ve got to do,” he said. “We”™ve got to retrain the people who want to come into this.”