“An industry in turmoil”

Seymour Specialty Wire was born into an industry in turmoil:

 “ArrowHead Metals just closed Eastern Rolling Mills is in Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization, the strip mill and tube mill at Chase Brass has been shut, the rod mill is for sale, and the sheet mill that was sold to employees and became North Coast Copper & Brass has been absorbed by American Brass.”

     -  Purchasing, 1990

“A painful adjustment to such fundamental changes I the metals market as end-product downsizing, just-in-time manufacturing, materials substitution, and foreign competition.”

     - David A Gardner, president of Cerro Metal Products Co., quoted in Purchasing, 1991

Workers ran Seymour Specialty Wire: An Employee-Owned Company for seven years.  Finally, in the midst of the broader crisis in the industry, the company was forced to close.

“I’m glad we did it.  I wish that we could have made it work.  I don’t have any regrets about it, because we kept the place going for seven years...

We got a lot of people to retirement with their pensions before we went under.  That was one of the things to make you feel good when you sit back and reflect on it.  And then you think about the ones that had already lost a job in the other plants that had closed and now were in their mid-forties, early fifties and its just going to be real, real hard for them to find something now.  That – that’s the kind of stuff that hurts.”

     - David Duke, SSW lab worker and union vice-president