ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, July 21, 1996 TAG: 9607220097
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: BEDFORD
SOURCE: RICHARD FOSTER STAFF WRITER
EMPLOYEES SAY they are paying for poor management decisions.
If you have a production job at Rubatex, you usually end up taking your work home with you - whether you want to or not.
David Newman, who has worked for Rubatex 26 years, brings home some of his every night - on his skin. He holds one of the least-envied of the 820 jobs at Rubatex's Bedford plant: For four to six hours a day, he weighs carbon black powder into bags that other workers dump into mixers that churn out raw rubber.
To start his day, Newman strips off his clothes and dons a paper chemical-protection suit and respirator, because the powder blows in the air like a fine mist. For the next several hours, without taking a break, he loads and measures carbon black in the plant's basement, a place with "a dungeon atmosphere," he said.
There's no air conditioning in the plant, except for the lunchroom and offices, and it gets hot in the suit. When he finishes, Newman has two hours to eat lunch and shower before ending his shift. It takes him an hour or more just to wash.
"You have to scrub like hell to get the black off," he said.
But he gets more of a break than many other workers. In the mill room, workers get a 20-minute lunch and two 10-minute breaks each eight-hour shift. They spend their day lifting and loading heavy bags of compounds into mixers and working with rubber stock that can often reaches temperatures of 300 degrees or more.
When it's 90 degrees outside, it's at least 120 degrees inside, the workers said.
"When you walk through the door, y'all can just stand there; and within 15 minutes, your shirt's going to get soaking wet," said Stacy Arrington, who has worked at the plant almost 10 years.
You also get dusty and smell like rubber. Some workers have reported trouble with asthma. Right after work on a recent day, Dennis Phillips, a nine-year employee, held out his bare arms. They were coated with a thick layer of white chemical dust from the mixing compounds. The company said exposure to the chemicals poses no cancer or health risks. The workers aren't so sure.
John Sines, a mill room employee, said some bags of compounds he works with, such as polyvinyl chloride, are labeled with health warnings that the substances can cause cancer or are harmful if inhaled.
Even on a day when Phillips isn't working with compounds, he said he still gets dirty from compound powder in the air. He used to leave work cleaner, he said, but that was before Rubatex's management sped up the production process.
In the last couple of years, workers said, they've been forced to increase the amount of rubber they make in a single batch while turning out finished batches quicker. Batches that used to take 30 minutes to cook now take about 15. Fifteen-minute batches are now 12 minutes or less.
For the workers, that means more compounds to lift and load. On average, they lift about 50 to 135 more pounds of compound per batch and they're expected to run about a third more batches than before. But, paradoxically, even though they're working more, less usable rubber is getting made, workers said.
That's because the machines they're working on are old and outdated and aren't designed to be run at the company's new specifications, the workers said. With the new haste in production, rubber hardly ever gets made right on the first try, they said. That means running the rubber through the machines again until it's right, and even then, it may not be the best quality.
"They don't update the machines," Arrington said. About rubber-cutting machines at the plant, he said: "We got slitters in the plant. How old's them slitters? They was made to slit rubber back in the '40s, and we still use them to slit diving suits today. They're a piece of junk. ... It's like taking a picture of a dinosaur."
Rubatex's competitors have newer mixing machines that can produce large batches of quality rubber in less time, and Rubatex management has been demanding the same results from their plant's old machines, said Charles Mallory. "But you can't get milk from a bull," Mallory said. "We can't keep up using these old machines."
Rubatex President and CEO Frank Roland admits that some of the things the company has tried in Bedford haven't worked, but he hopes to solve problems with old equipment in the mill room with a $1.5 million investment in new equipment this year.
Mallory and others say that management made its production changes in recent years without seeking advice from veteran rubber workers. Long-time foremen were either demoted or fired and replaced with people who had less experience.
Production delays caused late orders - customer shipments were late 33 percent of the time in the last six months of 1995, according to Rubatex - and over the last year, sales at Bedford have fallen $10 million. The amount of poor quality rubber returned by customers has increased, too - almost 2 percent of all sales last year were returned because of defective rubber, and that's more than company officials would like.
When production problems got near their worst this year and Rubatex threatened layoffs, many workers took that to mean that the company was blaming them and were insulted. "When [the managers] make decisions and they don't work, that's when they end up coming back on us. That's what got us in the spot we're in," Mallory said.
In May, Rubatex said it would move 287 jobs from Bedford to Arkansas if the union didn't agree to concessions including mandatory overtime and changes in worker seniority. Workers were afraid that senior workers would become vulnerable to layoffs and that, taken to its extreme, the mandatory overtime could force employees to work two 76-hour weeks a month.
At first, the union narrowly rejected the contract revisions, but after layoff notices were posted at the plant, the union agreed to the concessions in a revote.
The company hopes to solve problems with old equipment in the mill room with a $1.5 million investment in new equipment this year. And although Rubatex has canceled its layoff plan and said it won't abuse the new mandatory overtime rule, some workers still fear the future and distrust the company that has employed several generations of their families.
"Why do you push so hard for this overtime, if you're not going to use it? They say they're not going to enforce it, but they sure did work hard to get it," Newman said.
Not too many years ago, the entire plant was in production six days a week, three shifts a day usually. Now only one division runs around the clock. The department that makes the rubber that the rest of the plant needs is running only two shifts.
Some workers said they didn't know why the company wants mandatory overtime when there hasn't been as much work to do. Some think the company wants to consolidate the plant into two shifts working twelve hours each, instead of three shifts working eight hours a day.
But Roland said that's not his plan. He said mandatory overtime will be used to improve the company's on-time delivery record, so if a customer wants a rush order, it can get it.
"It's certainly not our goal to go to 12-hour shifts," Roland said. "In fact, it is our goal to operate the plant in such a way that we have minimal overtime."
Roland said layoffs aren't the motivation behind the seniority changes, either. It's a move to put more qualified workers in the jobs where they belong.
Roland described his management style as "nonconfrontational" and said he's committed to making the Bedford plant world-class.
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