When James Agee completed his long trek from Alabama to Niagara Falls, high-school diploma in hand, he faced a decision that recent graduates today can only dream about.
At 17, he had to choose whether to work at a factory in the city then known as Airco Speer, or make the daily commute to Lockport's Delphi Harrison facility.
With Airco Speer, which produced electrodes used in the electric steel-making process, just a few miles from his house, and with an uncle already working at the plant, it wasn't much of a decision.
Of course, that was in 1970. A little more than 32 years later, Agee and about 200 of his co-workers are left pondering their futures after the announcement that the owners of the Packard Road plant, now known as Carbide Graphite, will shut down for good by the end of the year.
"Maybe I should have taken that job at Delphi," Agee says, cracking a slight grin.
Agee, who ran a crane feeding the furnace at Plant No. 6, used his paychecks to support a family that grew to include seven children, 16 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. Too young, at 49, to think about retiring, he says he won't have to worry about paying his bills, either. Through extensive overtime and piece-work compensation, Agee says he made as much as $100,000 in the best of years.
"I tried to be smart and put some away for a rainy day," he says. "Gotta put some of that under the mattress, you know."
Many of his co-workers aren't nearly as fortunate, even though Carbide Graphite employees knew that rainy day was all but inevitable. Foreign imports, the North American Free Trade Agreement and an industry-wide price-fixing scandal that cost the company $33 million to settle lawsuits by steelmakers combined to drive the company's stock from a high of $39 a share to fractions of a penny this fall. Spending millions more to buy out executives didn't help either.
Another employee said the downward spiral echoed last year's collapse of Enron. Even as stock prices fell, Giuseppe Spagnolo said, the company's directors at its Pittsburgh headquarters (who also oversee operations at factories in St. Mary's, Pa., and Seadrift, Texas) encouraged plant managers and workers to buy, claiming prices would eventually approach $70.
"They thought they were going to get rich and retire early," Spagnolo says. "Now they've got no retirement at all."
At 48, Spagnolo is putting two children through college -- one at Niagara County Community College and one at Niagara University -- and has another one a few years away. He started full-time at the plant in 1973. Laid off in 1984, he and his wife, Suzette, opened an ice-cream shop in the City Market. Three months later, he was called back.
"It was either go with the risk, or the sure thing," Spagnolo says of his decision almost two decades ago. "Back then, the plant was the sure thing."
But things just got shakier from there. A group of Airco managers headed a buyout in 1988, renaming the company Carbide Graphite. To raise cash, they sold the machine shop in the St. Mary's plant to their chief competitor, Union Carbide. Then they sold technology to Chinese interests. Union Carbide became the undisputed market leader, while Chinese steel-production products have helped drive prices to levels that proved fatally low for Carbide Graphite.
Union Carbide made doing business anywhere in the United States more difficult for competitors a year ago, when it closed its last American plant and moved production to Mexico.
"They can make and ship their electrodes for less than we can just make them for," Spagnolo says. "And we can't undersell them -- they're too big. And to oversell would be suicide, from a business standpoint."
The plant's union workers, organized as Local 1-3516 of the Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical and Energy Workers, made concessions over the past few years in an effort to stay competitive. Along with salaried management, the hourly employees agreed to paycuts, gave up scheduled raises and downgraded their health-insurance plans. Workers like Agee also agreed to give up their piece-work pay. Their cost-cutting efforts helped attract potential buyers, but each possible bid has fallen apart over the last two months.
Another offer crumbled late last week, further dimming hopes of saving one of the last factories in the city to employ a large number of workers at a decent wage.
"Every time you get a little bit of hope, guys get depressed when it doesn't work out," Spagnolo says.
The job and related stress has taken a toll on many, including Spagnolo. He suffers from Krone's Disease, diabetes and stomach ulcers, and carries a pill box stuffed with his daily medication. Still, he hasn't given up. Spagnolo says he and other workers proposed an employee buyout long ago, using the $9.5 million in give-backs agreed to by workers as a starting point. But officials of the international union balked at the idea, leaving workers to wait for a white knight with a fat wallet. Banks for the company, which went into bankruptcy protection in September, 2001, are said to be asking $37 million for the facilities in New York, Pennsylvania and Texas.
"We can compete," Spagnolo says. "Union Carbide can't go any lower on their prices. They've got to start answering to their investors, too. I'm hopeful that there's going to be an investor. They've told us they've got more people interested."
The company's Web site (www.cggi.com) states that liquidation of assets will be complete by January, 2003. Word among the workers is that they'll be finished a little earlier than that.
"They'll probably close down before Christmas," Spagnolo says. "That way, they don't have to come up with any holiday pay."
If not, Spagnolo says he wants to go back to college, finish his degree and achieve a lifelong goal of teaching history in high school.
As for Agee, he's pondering a move back to the family farm in Linden, Ala., where his mother and brother still make their living. But he said he'll keep his property in Niagara Falls, the place where he's lived and worked his entire adult life.
"This is home," Agee says. "This is where my heart is."
But for Agee, Spagnolo, their co-workers and thousands like them who watched their factories close over the past few years, the jobs are somewhere else.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | November 12 2002 |