Artifacts of Workers’ Knowledge -- 1
Artifacts of Workers’ Knowledge:
Finding Worker Skill in the Closing and Restructuring of a Furniture Manufacturer
Tom Juravich
Professor
Labor Studies/Sociology
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Paper presented at the International Labour Process Conference
Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ
March 2013
Artifacts of Workers’ Knowledge:
FindingWorker Skill in the Closing and Restructuring of a Furniture Manufacturer
Tom Juravich
Professor
Labor Studies/Sociology
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Nichols and Stone, a furniture company that had been making chairs since1762, closed its doors in 2008-- the last chair manufacturer in Gardner, Massachusetts, long known as “Chair City.” Research on the labor process typically focuses on “people-at-work,” yet this plant closure provide two opportunities to interrogate issues of worker skill and “tacit knowledge” involved in the labor process. First, as part of preparation for the sale of the equipment after bankruptcy, workers and managers “discovered” a large number of jigs and fixtures that had been integral to production across the factory. In many ways they represented the sum total of the working knowledge of many generations of workers – in essence artifacts in the“archeology of knowledge.” The Nichols and Stone line was sold to Stickley, who now has furniture manufactured in Viet Nam, with final assembly in Manlius, NY. The restart of the production provides a second opportunity to examine skill and tacit knowledge. Without either experienced workers or the physical artifacts of knowledge in the jigs and fixtures that were left behind when the plant closed, managers and new workers, many of whom were immigrants, struggled getting production started. As several workers from the shuttered facility came to train new workers who had never worked in the industry it was clear they brought an embodied skill -- a habitus that had gone unnoticed in the old facility. Both of the moments, the end of production in Gardner and the start-up of production in Manlius shed light on the importance of workers’ skill and “tacit knowledge” that is in many ways invisible during normal times of production.
Skill remains one of the core concepts of the labor process literature. Since the publication of Labor and Monopoly Capital in 1974, this concept has remained contested, particularly with a new renaissance of work place ethnography over the past decade. This paper examines workers skill by interrogating the working knowledge and tacit skills of workers in the furniture industry through the closing of the Nichols and Stone plant in Gardner and its reorganization in Manlius, NY. Rather than focusing on workers involved in everyday production, interrogating the end of work provides an opportunity to step outside the conventional wisdom about worker skill and to search for evidence of working knowledge in both reflections on the labor process and in artifacts left behind-- a kind of archeology of knowledge.
The restart of the operation in a new factory with new workers allows us to examine what the workers in the closed facility brought to their jobs. As the firm struggled with start-up it brought several of the workers from the closed facility to train new workers. This provides us with a unique opportunity of evaluate their skills compared to those new workers and explore what kinds of skills developed through many years of work.
This research suggests that we must move beyond looking at skill as static intellectual attributes of individuals. Instead we need to examine workers skill with the dynamic and collective process of production.
Last Chair
Gardner, Massachusetts was once the center of the New England furniture industry. A two-story chair stands in front of one of the public schools as an icon for what is locally known as “chair city” (Moore 1967). Heywood-Wakefield, who created a whole new aesthetic for American wooden furniture with its curved and modern lines in the late 1940s and 1950shad a complex of buildings literally in the center of this small New England city. Heywood shuttered its facilities in 1979 which began the slow decline of furniture making in Gardner as firms relocated first to North Carolina, and later overseas.
In July 2008, the last major chair manufacturer in “chair city” closed. Nichols and Stone,a five generation family-owned company had been making chairs in central Massachusetts since 1762. They were well known for its reproductions of early American furniture, particularly its Windsor chairs and Boston rockers (Nichols 2009, 3). These were chairs with complex multiple bends, which was a trademark of Nichols and Stone’s heirloom quality chairs would be passed down many generations. The company was also known for their “college chairs”-- wooden chairs with college and university logos that are often seen in college offices or given to faculty for their retirement. They had started this line initially with Harvard University and expanded it nationwide,manufacturing these chairs in Gardner (Nichols 2009, 4).
When Carlton “Tuck’ Nichols Jr. took over the firm in 1968, gauging changing trends in the industry and seeing the limitations of a firm that made only chairs, he expanded the business to dining tables, cabinets and later bedroom furniture. As part of this expansion they bought several local firms in Gardner and later purchased a manufacturing facility in North Carolina. In 1990they were acquired by in an investment group, the AvenirCorporation that owned a number of other small manufacturing firms. Tuck Nichols and the rest of family continued to hold a significant amount of stock. Under Avenir’s direction they introduced a number of CNC (computer controlled) machines in the Gardner facility which became state of the art. Tuck Nicholas, does however note that, “One of the things that we did – they leveraged it up. They weren’t going to put too much of their money in. That ultimately was one of the problems when we started to see the whole change in the industry. We were leveraged a little more than I would have liked to see us” (2009, 10).
The company grew from $2 million in sales with Nicolas took the helm in 1968 to $40 million. The number of employees at Nichols and Stone swelled to 250. The workers were member of the United Furniture Workers, like many of the shops in the Gardner area (Cornfield 1987). The union office was right downtown in Gardner. By 1987 the industry was already in a slide and the furniture workers merged with the International Union of Electrical Workers (IUE) that in 2001 became part of the Communication Workers of American (CWA).
Nichols and Stone saw rising competition, first from Canada and then from overseas. They too, had begun outsourcing of production overseas, and began importing a bedroom line from Honduras. Beginning in 2005 the industry changed very rapidly, first in bedroom and the in dining, as Asian manufactures flooded the US. market. It put the company is a tough place. V.P. Peterson tells how “Things started to happen a lot faster and at more of a warp speed, now all of a sudden you couldn’t cut you labor or materials fast enough” (2009, 9). By 2011,the net job loss from 2001 for furniture workers nationally was 282,200 jobs, more than one half of the workers in the furniture industry (U.S. Census, 2011).
In addition to the increasing foreign competition, Nicholas and Stonelost several of their major furniture retailers. Anticipating what we would see nationally a few months later, their bank began tightening the screws on their loans. With sales plummeting they devised what they thought was the only way to survive in a global economy. They planned to subcontract the manufacture of all the parts for their furniture overseas and would move into a small part of their facility and become an assembly and finishing operation. Tuck Nicholas scouted out potential sources, but was overall extremely disappointed with the quality. Time was running out. They received approval fora loan from the state of Massachusetts that would have kept them afloat, but it was yanked at the last moment. When a deal fell through to sell the plant to make space for a big box retailer---a consequence of the great recession --the only option left was bankruptcy.
As part of bankruptcy they sold the intellectual property of Nicholas and Stone
to Stickley,another high-end furniture company base in Syracuse (Manlius) New York, known for its mission stylefurniture. In fact, Nichols and Stone was one of the manufactures that had supplied Stickley with chairs (Bouche2009, 14). It was an excellent fit. Stickley had a number of its own retail stores and had just opened up a new factory in Viet Nam. As part of the deal Tuck Nichols,A.J Peterson and former plant manager Denis Bouche would assist Stickley with the transition. Peterson describes the current production process.
They buy birch material from the United States, fill it up in containers in Manlius, New York, ship the container of rough woods to Vietnam and from there they fabricate the parts.They bring it back to the United States in what we call KD or “knock down” form, and then we assemble in New York, finish it and pack it and send it out. (2009:14).
The assembly and finishing is largely done by largely immigrant workers. Stickley reports that more than 30 languages are spoken in the plant, with their largest group immigrants from Viet Nam (Stickley 2011, 223). While the company highlights their “skilled immigrant craftsman,” there are many advantages for hiring them over local workers in an area with one of the highest unemployment rates in New York State. Despite this globalization of their production, Nichols and Stone markets it furniture as the “finest solid wood furniture made by the oldest furniture name in America.”
This research began as the examination of the closure of Nichols and Stone factory in Gardner. Given the number of plants closings that have occurred in the past three decades in the U.S. it is challenging to make a contribution to the literature. In theirBeyond the Ruins: The Meaning of Deindustrialization Jeff Cowie and Joseph Heathcott suggestthat we need to do more than simply write about “body counts” (2003). At same time we need to avoid what High, Steven and David W. Lewis (2007) refer to as the “museumification” of working class lives and communities or what Paul Clemenscalls “ruin porn” (2011).
For this research I conducted 19 interviews including workers, the three top managers, the mayor and the head of the Chamber of Commerce. I also consulted both public and historical documents as well as the photographs of two photographers that were given access to the plant before it closed along with two videos, one produced by the company the other by a cable television program. Given my interpretive research orientation and that I wanted to be open to new insights into a plant closing, my interviews were unstructured.While there is a larger political economic story to tell about Nichols and Stone, it became clear very quickly that embedded in this plant closing was a novel way to interrogate skill and the labor process.
An Archeology of Knowledge
To raise cash to pay off creditors as part of the bankruptcy process, Nichols and Stone scheduled an auction to liquidateall their machinery and equipment. It was a huge task to inventory, clean and in some cases disassemble equipment for the sale. Jack Heitaler, who had spent more than thirty years running the bending room couldn’t stay away, even though he retired many years ago. He spent three days watching and photographing the dismantling of the bending room (Heitaler 2009, 22).
As part of this process,CEO Tuck Nichols and V.P. for ManufacturingA. J. Peterson lingeredone afternoon in the bending room. Peterson tells, “On the walls there was shelf after shelf of various size hooks so that when you bent a bow you could make the opening of the bow so it was 18 inches versus 24 inches and so on” (2009, 17). Figure 1 illustrates what Peterson and Nichols sawon the wall that day in the bending room. He continues:
I guess what I’m saying is that Tuck and I stood in that bending room and we
said, if you had to put a value on that, you couldn’t do it. And even if it was physically possible to replace everything that was in that bending room today, the cost would be millions and millions and millions of dollars. So it was impossible to put a value on it. (2009, 17)
It was not just the machinery itself in the bending room that had value, but all the fixtures and jigs that were used to set up a machine to bend pieces for any specific chair. And it was not just in the bending room that Nichols and Peterson “discovered” jigs and fixtures. Peterson continues:
….There were things like that throughout the entire shop in each department, because it had been around for so long and all these little things… these little jigs, little things that made some process easier or …more routine. I think we were all kind of in shock. (2009,17)
Nichols echoes Peterson’s horror. “The hands and the creativity of labor – roomfuls! Just warehouse full of jigs and fixtures.” And now that the plant has ceased operation all of this knowledgein Nichols words was, “just lost” (2009, 21).
It is important to make a distinction between fixtures and jigs.[i] Fixtures tended to be more complextooling were often built to be used with specific machinery. Some were built in-house, other in local machine shops that supported the furniture industry in Gardner. Nichols explains,
A lot of the equipmentfor chair-making, was developed and built in Gardner by little companies, some of them right in the shop maintenance department of Heywood-Wakefield, some things in our shop… We worked to find a new way to shape this piece of wood, sand it, whatever. The untold hours … oh! And money; huge. (2009, 21)
Peterson tells how “All the presses were made by McKnight Machinery right in Gardner many, many years ago” (2009, 16). In many ways this network of shops large andsmall and the people that worked at them constituted a “community of knowledge” about the furniture industry and were fundamental in supporting the work of any one shop.
In addition to these formal fixtures and tooling, Nicholas and Peterson had “discovered” thousands of jigs created by individual workers of their own initiative--not directedto by supervisors. They lined the walls in most departments. A perfect example is provided Jack Heitaler. The longtime head of the bending room, his home isa virtual Nichols and Stone Museum. But it is not just a museum of artifacts but a record of his work and the processes he developed for a numberof prototypeshe showed me as we walked through his house on a summer’s morning. He beamed with pride ashe showed me his sheath bed and spoke about its development.
We got into the bedroom furniture about 15 years ago, which turned out to be a pretty profitable venture. We wanted to build a sheaf back bed to go with our sheaf back chairs. So they asked me if I could make sixteen different bends that would [make] a sheaf bead…asheaf back is like a sheaf of wheat, you know like a field of wheat blowing in the breeze. That’s what that’s supposed to represent. (2009, 8)
But at the time Nichols and Stone had never made anything with so many complex bends. “When I started working over there was I think four or five basic bends that they made in the presses.” He continues,
What I did, I took a lot of these presses and I adapted them to bending spindles and doing spindles like you saw on that sheaf back bed upstairs. That was a regular back press that was designed for bending back so I made up jigs that would override the press. I put stops in each leaf and stops to work the bend to a certain degree.(2009, 13)
Without instruction or specific direction, Hietaler designed a series of jigs to override the press to create the multiple bends that they needed for the sheath bead. Although not formally trained, Heitaler was, even without certificationwas a tool-maker.
But the jigs used throughout the shop were not just created by semi-skilled workers like Jack given how common they were. For example,in 2007 the cable television program “American Builder”visited the Nicholas and Stone plant in Gardner (American Builder 2007). While much of the show focused on the multi-function numerically (computer) controlled machines,the viewer could see examples of a number of jigs in operation in the manufacturing process. In Figure 2, a worker is attaching the sliders to the underside of a table that would allow the table to be opened or closed to add or remove leaves. Between the two slides you can see a flat piece of wood that operates as a jig determines the spacing between the sliders and assuring they are parallel to each other (a variety of other jigs were also involved in the installation of the sliders and the table apron). The jig has a marking that references the type of table it is used for, and even has a small knob has been attached on the left to remove the jig once the sliders have been installed.