Shooting for jobs

Meanwhile, in far-off New Haven
    By Ben Smith

Good jobs, in New Haven? Here's one: "I'm a gun tester. I shoot, all day long."

Few of the jobs at the Winchester Rifle plant are quite that good. But the factory, a low-lying, modern building on aptly-named Division Street, just minutes beyond Science Hill, provides what America has long considered "good jobs"—steady work making things. The workers make hunting rifles and shotguns. But despite the fact that Winchesters mostly kill animals, not people, the plant has seen a decline in production with the rise of national anti-gun sentiment. Winchester has been making guns in New Haven for most of this century, as the derelict red factory buildings next door to the new plant attest. Winchester's parent, the Olin Corporation, built this plant in 1992 after the state and city offered tax breaks adding up to nearly $10 million over 20 years. In return, the company (which then employed 575 people) promised to keep employment levels over 400, with at least 200 drawn from New Haven itself. Late last year city officials found the plant had only 353 workers, and they announced that Winchester had until this September to bring employment up to agreed-upon levels.

It's not clear that the special deals cities and states cut corporations and sports teams really do the locals much good. New Haven got a big head start in the national "race to the bottom" with its $10 million tax break, but Southern states with looser labor regulations can undoubtedly go lower. Still, a deal's a deal, and the company has no right to break it. The real question is how job levels got this low in the first place.

The company claims that it dropped workers because the gun trade isn't what it once was, and a union representative acknowledged that reality. Jeff Perinetti, a representative of the factory's union (the International Association of Machinists), works in the Machinists' Hartford district office, and he seems to agree. "I'd love to see them place thousands of workers in there," he said. "But in the last few years, they've probably lost 100,000 units—that's a lot of guns."

Local 609 was founded during a World War II gun manufacturing boom, and the union is still called Victory Lodge, though it's not clear whether the title refers to the defeated Germans or to the anti-union factory owners. But the Machinists no longer represent labor's avant-garde, and the union hasn't been quite so confrontational this time around. Community groups like Elm City Congregations Organized brought the matter to the attention of the city, and it has since been framed as a fight between the city and the union.

Activists charge that those units haven't just been lost, and many of the workers, pouring out of the factory at 3:30 after the first shift, seemed to agree. "Now they have one or two people doing a job that used to take three or four," said a man from the shipping department. A programmer in a black Machinists jacket, who identified himself only as Vinnie, sided with the community activists, pointing out that the company had recently closed a Massachusetts plant, while they opened a new one in North Carolina. "They just don't have the skills down there," he said.

Winchester spokesman Hardy Merrill didn't really feel like discussing it. When, after a series of unreturned phone messages, I called him from the heavily-guarded gun factory's security desk, he simply told me that "it's not an issue until September 1999." When pressed, he admitted that perhaps the market was coming back. A mid-level manager, speaking off the record, explained the company's position from another angle: Winchester, he said, was doing its best to hire locals—the problem is, the new employees are too lazy, they miss work, and "one half of these people fail the drug tests."

Winchester isn't exactly engaged with the community. Most of the management lives outside New Haven, and I left with the impression that the factory thinks it's doing "these people" a favor by employing any of them. And it's hard to believe that Winchester has simply exhausted all channels of convincing non-drug addicts who live in New Haven to accept regular work. Two "help wanted" ads (conveniently posted in the factory lobby) advertised positions for barrel polishers and wood shapers, with starting salaries of around $11 per hour. That's a lot better than local residents can do in the largely non-union service industry, and even McDonald's frowns upon hiring drug addicts.

Under a sign bragging that Winchester employs the "greatest craftsmen," one worker smoked his cigarette and looked somewhat suspiciously at the Yale kid who emerged from the lobby to ask him about his employer. A grizzled black man in a torn green jacket, he repeated that he didn't really have any opinion on the company's employment practices. Finally, I mentioned the manager's complaints about drug addicts. The worker shook his head and couldn't resist asking, "That's the easy way out, isn't it?"

Recent Herald Columns by this Columnist:
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• How to break into a Toyota Corolla, 2/5/99
• A tale of two tragedies, 1/22/99
• Yale oversteps its jurisdiction, 12/4/98

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