Some civic leaders argued that the Newell takeover benefited Lancaster. The paper editorialized that the town should welcome the newcomer with open arms and make the arriving team feel like Lancaster was their home, too. Even the unions said at first that they were pleased with Newell. But the enthusiasm felt forced, based more on relief than on real optimism. Coming after the intense uncertainty and resentment that had haunted the company and the town since Icahn, Lancaster clung to any island of stability.
And there was optimism within the company itself. “Newellization” introduced a few needed modern efficiencies and systems that Anchor Hocking had neglected—like data and accounting techniques, order tracking, customer service methods. Profit as a percentage of revenue rose. Newell also tried smoothing relations with the unions that had been left embittered by Topper. It held regular “burgers on the bricks” events, during which salaried staff cooked hamburgers at the plant for the hourly workers.
On the other hand, Newell infused Anchor Hocking with some of the “brutality” that Peter Roane said had been missing in the old management. It eliminated the apprenticeship program, in which raw talent from the community would be turned into skilled, specialist experts. Newell was laser-focused on bottom-line performance. Nobody got hired at Old Bill Bailey’s anymore, and if you failed to hit targets, nobody hunted for a position in which you could find “your level of competence.” You were fired.
“They told us that, going forward, we’d never be any more responsible or any more accountable for what we did and our actions than from this day,” recalled Mike Shook, who led a product design and development team. Shook liked that.
But not everybody did. Newell fired a lot of people throughout the operation, not just in the headquarters building.
“Newell was bad people,” Dale Lamb said. “Bad people.”
This was certainly the view of Vermont American. At the same time Daniel Ferguson was pursuing Anchor Hocking, he was also chasing Vermont American, a Louisville, Kentucky–based tool company. Vermont American was public, but closely held by members of two families. It had always been run very much like a family business, with a conservative, long-term view. It grew by investing profits in new products, marketing, and quality, not by making acquisitions. Lee Thomas, the chairman of the board, preferred decision-making by the Quaker principles of “consensus and compromise.” The strategy worked. Vermont American had a long record of profitable growth.
Using tactics Thomas and other officers of Vermont American found deceptive, Newell began acquiring stock, just as it had with Anchor. And just as he had at Anchor, Ferguson at first denied having any desire to take over the company. But Vermont American had learned a lesson from Anchor’s experience.
“At times Newell had acquired public corporations at bargain prices through ‘creeping acquisitions’ and two-tier tender offers,” Vermont American told a Delaware court. “This was true, for example, in Newell’s acquisition of Anchor Hocking Corporation in 1986. There Newell accumulated the company’s stock and eventually acquired complete equity control of Anchor Hocking. In order to generate increased profitability Newell at times would follow its acquisitions by asset-stripping, plant closures and layoffs.”
After a long battle, Vermont American escaped Ferguson’s uninvited embrace by selling itself to a consortium of Emerson Electric and the German company Bosch. Newell walked away with a $26 million profit on the sale of its Vermont American shares.
Lamb’s opinion hardened in 1992, when Newell tried to increase the amount those who had already retired would have to pay for health insurance premiums. “They was gonna triple it or quadruple it,” he recalled.
The Flint rank and file seemed reluctant to invite conflict over the issue. According to Lamb, that was because Newell “was in bed with some of the union guys.” Newell, Lamb charged, would co-opt a union officer by having him appointed as a shop lead, which paid more per hour. The officer, in turn, wouldn’t challenge the company or rouse his members to action, for fear of losing his new position and extra pay. So Lamb mounted a campaign.
First, he put some old retirees on a picket line and had them walk in front of the distribution center and Plant 1. Then, as contract negotiations dragged on at the old Holiday Inn on 33, Lamb hired a ragtime piano player to beat out militant march songs and called workers to come over to the motel’s lounge.
“They started comin’ in, and she’s pounding that baby like, man! The place was packed. Standing room. The old guys was all there; we had four policemen just in case. They knew what might happen.”
Lamb explained the issue, saying the union had the right to strike to protect the benefits of the retirees. Some younger workers resisted: “‘Why do you care about them? They’re gone.’”
Lamb couldn’t believe his ears. This wasn’t the union he thought he knew. Perhaps the Flints had been beaten down since the 1980s. Maybe they considered themselves so lucky to have a job at all, when the news was filled with disappearing union work, that they preferred not to endanger the status quo. Lamb’s theory was that too many of them had bought boats and motorcycles, lived a little high—often on credit—with no stomach for sacrifice.
“‘Well, they made it what we are!’” he exclaimed of the old retirees who had fought for better pay and working conditions, suffering through a long strike in the 1960s, for example. “‘If we do it to them, what [is the company] gonna do to us? That’s not the way life is! You know that’s not the way it is! He died for us on the cross!’”
His tactics worked. The union issued an ultimatum to management: Roll back the retiree premium hikes and slightly boost current-worker retiree benefits or the Flints would walk. In response, Newell preemptively shut the plant down, bringing in security guards dressed like storm troopers.
Joe Boyer walked a picket line, even though he’d been in Plant 1 for only two years. Boyer had worked at an auto parts store and as an auto mechanic before that, but when he realized working on cars was never going to get him out of his parents’ house on Mulberry Street, just a few blocks from where I. J. Collins and Bill Fisher had lived, he talked to a neighbor who worked in the furnace room at Anchor. Boyer’s father had worked at Anchor, making a decent living there, and now Boyer thought maybe he should, too.
Like the generations before him, Boyer started in the sluer, put in a bid for the hot end, became a floor boy, and worked his way up. He operated a press, making pressed-glass casserole dishes and other bakeware, mainly. He preferred presses over the H-28s—their rotations, and walking around them to service the molds, made him feel a little queasy, almost dizzy.
“Standing right next to it gives you a funny feeling, and I had some bad experiences. I got caught in one: It ripped my glove off, it ripped my watch off. I just didn’t like operating those. I liked the press ’cause they will move, and then stop, and you’ve got time to work on it. You could lose a hand in a press, too, but it’s different.”
Joe was a gearhead who was good with his hands—and took pride in his work. But he didn’t feel especially attached to the company. Guys would tell him about how it used to be in the plant and the company, back before Newell, but it wasn’t like that anymore. There were no more baseball or bowling leagues, no more softball games, golf outings, company clubs. The company didn’t love him. He didn’t love it. It was strictly business. He put in his time, took his check, went home. He even avoided union meetings. Though he walked the line, he wasn’t sure what the strike was all about. Most of the younger guys were like Boyer: They didn’t care who signed their checks, as long as somebody signed them.
The strike lasted a month. Salaried employees tried to work the machines. They packed ware and loaded trucks. For some of them, it was the first time they lived the life of a factory worker. “We had nurses there, and when we’d come into work, they’d tape up our fingers and hands, put elbow braces, knee braces on some of us,” Shook recalled with a laugh. In the end, Newell decided not to raise retiree premiums as it had planned, but the company gave current workers only a token increase in retirement benefits for the future.
Lamb didn’t want to settle on those terms. Newell was spending millions upon millions of dollars on acquisitions—it could spare a few bucks for workers’ pensions. In fact, even as Newell was trying to cut Anchor retiree benefits, Ferguson was mounting yet another hostile-takeover fight, this time over the Stanley Works of New Britain, Connecticut. (It lost when a court approved a settlement that maintained Stanley’s independence and forced Newell to desist.) Who knew what the future would bring? Lamb told his Flint brothers, “Be prepared.” You might think life with Newell was okay now, but it wasn’t like the old days, when Anchor was just Anchor, and your kids went to school with Gushman’s kids and Barber’s kids and Ellwood’s kids. Now it was just one of many Newell divisions. The real power was in Illinois, inside Newell’s offices. Just five years after the takeover, there were already signs that Anchor wasn’t Newell’s favored child anymore. Someday, Anchor could be tossed aside.
The members instructed him to settle. “I lost a couple of friends on that one,” he said. The strike didn’t dent Anchor’s profits. The glass operations made money for their new parent, contributing significantly to Newell’s return on equity, a measure Newell liked to parade for investors.
Anchor Hocking’s success in satisfying Newell’s management put to rest the myth that Anchor Hocking—and the glass business in the United States in general—could never compete against imports and that offshoring American glass manufacturing was the only way American glass companies could stay in business.
* * *
Shocked as it was over the events since Carl Icahn first put Anchor Hocking in play, the town tried to tell itself that everything would be okay. And on the surface it seemed to be, at first. People got used to the absence of the headquarters. There were still about twelve hundred people working at Plant 1 and the DC. Not all the former executives and spouses and families left—not right away, anyway. At the insistence, and through the persistence, of an Anchor attorney, extra weeks of service were added to the tenures of some office employees during the negotiations with Newell, so some were able to take an early retirement and remain in town rather than having to find a new job elsewhere. Lancaster Glass remained in business, and though Diamond Power was losing orders for its soot blowers, thanks to a move away from coal-fired power generation, it remained, too. Drew Shoe had nearly a hundred people making footwear.
The county fair still arrived every October, kids still showed their prized heifers and rabbits and lambs, and people still tossed Ping-Pong balls into little goldfish bowls to win a fish in a baggie. The festival—thank goodness for the festival, many said—still animated the town every July. Well over a hundred people still volunteered, Andy Rooney–like, to put on the show. Those who could still donate money did so. Attendance climbed every year. Membership at the country club declined, but kids still swam in the club pool. Tiki and Miller weren’t as crowded in the summers as they once were, but they were still popular.
But the bond between Anchor and Lancaster had been as much emotional as financial, and that bond was irredeemably broken. Newell had no emotional investment in the town. On the contrary, it seemed determined to avoid it.
Anchor Hocking donations to the local United Way dropped to just a few thousand dollars, from $50,000 the year before the takeover. Despite the Eagle-Gazette’s entreaties to make the new team welcome, there wasn’t anyone to welcome. Newell executives rotated in and out of Anchor Hocking, a way station to what they hoped would be higher-ranking jobs within the Newell galaxy. From 1987 to 2004, Anchor Hocking had six CEOs, none of whom lived in Lancaster. The company had five CEOs in the eighty-two years before the takeover, all of whom lived there. To Newell’s executives, Lancaster looked like an old hick town. They didn’t know the Lancaster story, and didn’t care to know it. That was what hurt the most, maybe. Nobody came out and said, “You’re not good enough for me,” and I could find no evidence that Newell ordered executives not to live there, no matter how many people told me otherwise, but the humiliating insult of their absence was real enough all the same.
Whether because of the conservative small-government tide ushered in by Reagan, or because many internalized its diminished status and lost confidence in the future—and any willingness to invest in it—or both, Lancaster stopped spending on itself. In 1988, the year Brian Gossett was born, a vote to increase Lancaster property taxes to support the schools failed. The next year, the year Mark Kraft was born, the city’s school district tried to pass a small income tax, with the proceeds allocated for operating expenses. That failed, too. Voters soundly defeated road improvement taxes and bond issues.
The trend continued into the 1990s. A 1996 school-funding ballot measure lost by a thousand votes. Out of 18,521 registered voters, only 6,939 participated.
In the late 1990s, Lancaster’s schools, once a source of town pride, cratered. According to a state “report card” of school districts, Lancaster’s passed only ten of twenty-seven standards. Most fourth graders couldn’t pass a reading test. By 2000, fourth and sixth graders failed nine out of ten proficiency standards.
In 1991, the fire department employed seventy-four firefighters. By 2016, it employed sixty-nine, even though the number of calls had more than doubled and the population had increased, thanks to Columbus commuters buying up tract housing on the city’s newly annexed north side.
Old rules and common restraints eroded. Lancaster suffered embarrassing scandals that made people from all around Ohio wonder just what kind of hillbilly town it was. In 2000, Gary DeMastry, the Fairfield County sheriff, was indicted for misspending the public’s money, roughly $300,000. He was convicted and sentenced to state prison in 2002. Also in 2002, Municipal Court judge Don McAuliffe torched his own house to collect the insurance money. He was indicted in 2003, convicted in 2004, and sentenced to prison.
In the mid-1970s, every teenager with even a few social skills knew where to find some anemic marijuana. (My first joint was shared with the sons of a local attorney and an insurance man. We survived.) But the poorer Lancaster became, the more drugs clung to the web of its life. In June 2001, county law enforcement agencies applied for—and were given—a state and federal grant to start a new task force called the Major Crimes Unit (MCU). When they applied for the grant, they cited methamphetamine and crack as their number-one concerns. But they’d also begun to see a new drug: OxyContin pills. The mere existence of something called a Major Crimes Unit appalled the longtime Lancastrians who remembered when a “major crime” was a kid stealing a case of beer from the basement of a grocery store.
Some in Lancaster, led by the old core of post–World War II residents, refused to go prostrate. They responded the way they always had. The west side, around Plant 1, suffered the most from the breakdown of Lancaster’s education system. As Anchor Hocking declined, more and more west-siders fell into poverty and family dysfunction. Too many children were failing to learn. So in 1998, Rosemary Hajost, MCU chief Eric Brown’s mother-in-law, along with the director of a west-side food bank, the principal of West School, and a west-side minister, formed a committee to address the problem. They created the West After School Program.
Hajost rounded up now-elderly friends like Nancy Frick (the former Nancy George) for another tour of volunteerism. They brought paper, pencils, and their children’s old books to the basement of the United Methodist Church, by the Anchor Hocking parking lot. One day each week, the volunteers tutored children in reading, math, and general behavior.
By 1990, the Lancaster YMCA had fallen into disrepair. A capital campaign raised $840,000 to rejuvenate the building. Then, in 1998, Robert K. Fox, the retired president of Lancaster Glass, donated $1.5 million—almost half the cost of a $3.5 million expansion.
With the sale of Anchor Hocking, there was a pool of well-to-do retirees who were migrating out of town, but no mechanism to capture money they might wish to leave to Lancaster. So, at the urging of a local probate judge—who had seen too many estates leave the city, as I. J. Collins’s had—forty people, most of them older, met and formed the Fairfield County Foundation in 1989. Nancy Frick volunteered to serve as the first executive director.
* * *
As the town felt diminished, so did Anchor Hocking. When it was purchased, Anchor ware was considered a “core” product line for Newell, though Newell continued to sell off bits of it, like a perfume bottle maker. Dan Ferguson retired as CEO in 1992, the year of the Anchor strike, but Newell kept acquiring: WearEver cookware, which it combined with Mirro; an office products company; pencil and pen makers Faber-Castell and Sharpie; Levolor window treatments; hair and beauty accessories. In 1990, it even made a run at Lancaster Glass. But after financier James Goldsmith made an Icahn-like charge for the Akron-based Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, Ohio passed anti-takeover laws, joining a parade of other states responding to the leveraged-buyout wave with a bipartisan counterattack meant to protect their industries. So Lancaster’s parent company, Columbus-based Lancaster Colony Corporation, moved the corporate registration from Delaware to Ohio. Lancaster Colony found shelter back home.
Newell was relentless. The American Promise had changed from the time of Forbes’s elevation of the Lancaster way. Modesty was out, acquisitiveness was in. America became a big-box nation—cheap goods for a people newly addicted to cheap stuff—and Newell wanted to be the big-box wholesaler to the big-box retailers, the place where Walmart, Target, Kmart, Home Depot, Staples, and Lowe’s could go to find all kinds of products for their shelves. Every new annual report contained a list of companies Newell had absorbed. And as the list of Newell companies grew longer, Anchor’s relative importance grew smaller.
In 1997, Newell acquired Rolodex, and, in 1998, cookware maker Calphalon. Then, in October of that year, it decided to swallow a whale: Rubbermaid, a company that included not only the famous Rubbermaid storage containers, but Graco baby strollers and Little Tikes toys. Newell, already carrying about $900 million in long-term debt, agreed to pay $5.8 billion. Newell changed its name to Newell Rubbermaid.
The merger, completed in 1999, nearly killed the company. Rubbermaid was more troubled than Newell had suspected. Newell’s enormous debt was suffocating. And Newell had grown so many tentacles, each with its own operations, that its famously strict control over each tentacle eroded. Return on equity fell, and Newell, once Wall Street’s darling, was cast off. On April 21, 1999, Newell closed at $52 per share. By the fall of 2000, it was trading at $19, even as the stock market was on the biggest bull run in history.
* * *
Glass plants run on money as much as on heat, sand, and labor. The best furnace can’t hold up forever under the strain of 2,400-degree molten glass. Furnaces need overhauls, and then—when overhauls won’t do—to be rebuilt. Machines require maintenance.
The factories themselves need to run. Unlike, say, when a company makes strollers, pens, or hair clips, you can’t just stop a glass factory. Back in 1905, when Collins ran day tanks, he could make glass until he emptied the tank. He could shut off the lights and go home. But you can’t easily idle a glass plant like Anchor Hocking, where huge continuous tanks contain tons of molten glass. Glassmen understand this. For much of its history, when the slow spring-to-early-summer sales season rolled around, Anchor made ashtrays and other items from which it expected to make little or no profit, just to keep the plant operating. The items were put into inventory to be used as loss leaders. But the business school boys Newell sent through Anchor never seemed to grasp the concept. That lack of understanding didn’t matter so much when both Anchor and Newell were running full steam and Anchor was meeting its financial goals for the parent. But now that Newell was tripping over itself, the goals changed. Newell needed—or wanted—better margins, and Anchor came to be viewed as an expensive stepchild. As a result, Newell began skimping on maintenance and upgrades.
“We ran by the seat of our pants,” Chris Nagle recalled. “If baling wire would go out of business, Anchor wouldn’t have been running, ’cause we used wire to keep stuff. You wanted a piece of equipment up, you’d wire this section up.”
Newell shuffled CEOs. On January 1, 2001, the board hired forty-two-year-old Joseph Galli. Galli had started his career at Black & Decker, then, in 1999, joined Amazon as president. He made a generally bad impression on the employees. Thirteen months after he was hired, Galli left Amazon for another Internet company called VerticalNet. Five months after being hired there, he took over Newell Rubbermaid.
Galli restructured the company into four brand segments: Rubbermaid, Sharpie, Irwin Tools, and Calphalon Home. Anchor was shunted into Calphalon. Most office operations in Lancaster, like marketing, moved to Calphalon’s offices in Toledo. More Lancastrians lost their jobs.
“They took the business away from us,” Shook recalled. “I started attending product development meetings, but would have to drive to Toledo. I just sat around, waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for them to tell me to go pound sand: ‘We don’t need you.’ Well, that all went to hell in a handbasket in pretty short order.” Calphalon wanted no part of trying to market a product it knew nothing about; it soon sent the work back down to Lancaster.
Shook kept his job, but it was obvious to everyone that, fourteen years after fighting like hell to take it over, Newell no longer wanted Anchor Hocking. It was now a “non-core” business.
“They did everything under the sun to ruin us,” another Anchor veteran recalled. Anchor was not alone in feeling the pain. Other towns with a Newell presence had it worse, crushed by global politics and Friedmanesque corporate profit seeking.
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect on January 1, 1994, removing tariffs from goods traded between the three signatory nations. Republicans and many Democrats swore NAFTA would be a boon for American business and workers. That same year, Bill Clinton renewed China’s most-favored-nation trading status, despite having criticized the same move by his predecessor, George H. W. Bush. Clinton had cited China’s repression of human rights as the reason for his initial opposition, but lobbying by U.S. manufacturing executives apparently changed his mind. China quickly joined the World Trade Organization.
Most CEOs, corporate boards, and large shareholders loved the trade agreements. But factory workers and the unions that represented them paid the price.
Galli shut down Mirro’s offices and factories in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, where the company was first established in 1897, and sent the manufacturing to Mexico. Mirro’s corporate functions were sent to Calphalon in Toledo. About nine hundred people were thrown out of work.
Galli was increasingly desperate to dump Anchor, too. In May 2001, he laid off three thousand employees from several Newell companies. Rumors spread around town that Anchor was about to close. Company officials refused to comment.
Lancaster had already lost jobs that year. The heirs of the longtime owners of Drew Shoe sold the company in 1997 to BCAM, an outfit trying to commercialize ergonomic pump bladders like the ones once built into athletic shoes. BCAM hoped to use such bladders in the medical shoes Drew made for diabetics, the elderly, the arthritic. The hope proved illusory, and BCAM never made a penny. A year later, it sold control of Drew to Wexford Management, a New York investment company founded by an alumni of Alvarez & Marsal, the same fix-it firm Sam Solomon would encounter on his first day in the Anchor offices. On March 30, 2001, Wexford announced it would close the Drew factory in Lancaster and move production to China. Ninety-four shoemakers received pink slips. A century of shoemaking in Lancaster came to an end. Drew Shoe’s presence in Lancaster narrowed to a few office workers and a warehouse that received shipments from China and sent shoes to retailers and dealers.
* * *
As it turned out, the rumors of an Anchor sale were true. Negotiations were already under way to sell Anchor to Libbey, its longtime Toledo rival. On June 17, Newell and Libbey signed the deal. Libbey would pay $332 million for Plant 1, Monaca, and the DC.
Lancaster celebrated. Now, at last, glass people would resume control of Anchor Hocking. Ohio glass people. Yes, Libbey and Anchor had been fierce competitors for nearly a hundred years, but suddenly all that history was recast as two brothers who fought constantly but who both had glass in their veins.
There was, however, a problem that few considered: Libbey led the market for food service glassware—the glasses used by restaurants, hotels, cruise lines, institutions. The little cursive “L” on the bottoms of bar glasses was as ubiquitous as the little anchor was on glass measuring cups, pie plates, and tumblers in homes all across America. Anchor also sold to the food service segment. The Libbey-Anchor combination could result in overwhelming domination.
The Federal Trade Commission thought so. In December, it registered its opposition to the sale. Local officials were outraged. Mayor Art Wallace, a retired Anchor employee, argued that the FTC shouldn’t be worried about Libbey and Anchor taking over the market; it should be worried about the Mexicans and the Chinese. Wallace and others tried to enlist their state and federal representatives in a lobbying effort to turn back the FTC’s objections but were met with either silence or token letters. Wallace was dismayed by the anemic response, but he shouldn’t have been. It was the harvest of what had been sown by the Ohio state Republican party.
Clarence Miller served as Lancaster’s congressman for decades. Miller was a former municipal gas company employee, city councilman, and mayor. Since being elected to Congress from what was then Ohio’s Tenth District, he’d been an unexciting but diligent and well-respected Republican in Washington. Though conservative, Miller was no dogmatist. He advocated for coal miners in the southern part of his district, as well as for the area’s businesses. But by the 1990s, Miller was viewed as old-school. He didn’t fit with the red-tie-wearing, well-coiffed, Young Americans for Freedom Newt Gingrich ideologues who ascended to power in the wake of Reagan. So, in another blow to Lancaster’s prestige, Republicans in the legislature gerrymandered Miller out of his own district. Lancaster’s new congressman lived in Springfield, a small city between Dayton and Columbus on the I-70 corridor. He didn’t know Lancaster, certainly didn’t care about it like Miller did, and lacked the D.C. firepower to make any sort of difference. Mayor Wallace and his local colleagues were on their own.
Newell tried to appease the FTC by carving Anchor’s food service business out of the deal and lowering the price to $277 million, but the agency remained adamant. The FTC insisted that Anchor Hocking was healthy, with a strong balance sheet. And it was, despite the backlog of deferred maintenance. But Lancaster had witnessed the closing of one major manufacturing plant and the world headquarters of a Fortune 500 company, had suffered the loss of thousands of jobs and much of the city’s civic leadership, and had stood by while Newell whittled what was left of Anchor Hocking down to a matchstick. Drew Shoe had sent its workers to the unemployment line that very year. None of that looked like health.
In April 2002, a U.S. district court judge ruled in favor of the FTC. Negotiations to find a way to satisfy the agency and the court resumed, but were quickly shut down when the FTC filed a complaint in May arguing that even if Newell retained certain molds and accounts related to the food service market, there was still a substantial risk that Libbey would wind up with a monopoly. On June 10, almost exactly one year after it first offered to buy Anchor, Libbey gave up.
A few people did stop to think that Lancaster’s enthusiasm for Libbey might have been misplaced. Perhaps the FTC’s opposition was a blessing in disguise. Most just assumed Libbey would still operate Plant 1 as it was, or even expand it. But Nagle, for one, knew a little about what was happening inside Libbey’s Toledo factory. “They got thirty-some feeders up there,” he said to himself, thinking of the lines delivering molten glass from the tanks to forming machines. “They’re wantin’ machines underneath them. They’ll just move Anchor up there.”
“They woulda gutted us,” Nagle told me. Galli promised Lancaster that the factory would stay open. “If we can’t sell it, we’re going to do a good job running that business,” he said. Analysts agreed that Anchor Hocking would still make profits for whoever owned it.
Three weeks later, Newell cut forty-five salaried and clerical jobs at Anchor Hocking. Eventually, in the Newell annual report, Anchor was no longer accounted for under “Calphalon Home.” It fell into a category labeled “Other.”
Galli still wanted out of the glass business. But he couldn’t simply walk away from Anchor Hocking. For one thing, glass had been made on the site of the old Black Cat for a hundred years. During much of that time, the Hocking, and then Anchor Hocking, used toxic ingredients, as did all glassmakers. A 1916 recipe for ruby (red) glass from the old Lancaster Lens included arsenic, selenium, and cadmium, among other materials (like “bone ashes,” which was exactly what it sounded like). Newell owned not only Plant 1 but whatever had accumulated in the buildings, soil, and groundwater around it.
His only option was to sell. But the FTC had made it clear that selling to another large glassmaker would likely bring scrutiny. He could, however, sell it off to an investment group. To do that, Newell would have to make Anchor as appealing as possible.
New rumors circulated that layoffs were coming, but Newell refused to tell anyone what it was about to do. It rebuffed inquiries from the mayor, the unions, the paper, the local branch of the state’s Department of Job and Family Services. Finally, under pressure from the unions, which pleaded that workers needed to know their fate before Christmas, Newell acted. On December 3, 2002, five months after Galli reassured Lancaster, Newell fired 175 factory workers and shut down one of the plant’s three tanks and all the shops that tank supplied.
Lancaster reacted like a desperate lover. It was both furious and appeasing, wanting to mend the relationship any way it could, hoping that if it just kept appearing at the door with flowers, it would all be different next time.
On February 27, 2003, the Lancaster Board of Education voted to approve a deal brokered by the Lancaster City Council and the Fairfield County Commissioners to take money from the city schools and give it to Newell. The deal granted Newell a 100 percent tax abatement—a loss of $50,000 per year to the schools—on $30 million of new investment Newell promised to make in Anchor Hocking. Newell also promised to maintain at least nine hundred jobs there. The city and the county also lost tax dollars in the deal.
Lancaster’s schools, and the rest of the town’s finances, were already suffering. Just one year earlier, the city council president had told Lancaster that the streets weren’t being maintained, that fire protection was inadequate, that city employees would be laid off. The city was in a financial “crisis,” he said. In fiscal year 2003, Ohio’s Republican governor, Bob Taft, cut school funding after the Republican-dominated legislature refused to increase cigarette taxes. In May 2003, Lancaster’s schools cut $2.2 million. In February 2004, the district cut another $1 million out of its budget and fired twenty-one people.
A month after the schools agreed to the deal with Newell, Newell issued its annual report for 2002: net sales of $7.5 billion. In his letter to shareholders, Galli was ecstatic over the results. “These are exciting times at Newell Rubbermaid,” he said.
They were not exciting for Anchor. As he unwrapped a generous gift from the schools, the city, and Fairfield County, Galli successfully lowered Anchor’s employee count and cut its production by one-third.
* * *
Joe Boyer moved into the operators’ local in 1998. Despite his lack of enthusiasm for the union, the local made him a committeeman for his shift. Committee members who failed to show for union meetings were fined. So Boyer showed. Somebody at one of those meetings nominated him to be a vice president of the local. “I thought: Well, I’ll do that … just ’cause I don’t know anything about unions. I’ll just see what’s going on, how a union works from the inside.”
Not everything was rosy, but, like Lamb, Boyer “enjoyed being part of the Flints. It was kind of like a big family then with the Flints. They were really nice.”
Because Newell was both a hard employer and never really understood glass—its Anchor CEOs were never there long enough to pick up the nuances—the Flints became more important to each worker than the union had been in fifty years. The Flints knew everything there was to know about making glass and operating a glass factory. An experienced operator could tell when a nut with more threads, good threads, holding up the spring cage of a press might be coming loose, because he could hear a change each time the press descended onto a mold. But even experienced workers couldn’t hear that same noise if the threads on the nuts were old and worn. If one of those old, worn nuts gave way and a spring cage let loose and fell, it could wreck a machine. The worker would take the blame. He wasn’t paying attention, management would say. But with the Flints, when the local filed a grievance on behalf of the worker in such a situation, the president of the union, usually a glassman himself, would often come down from Toledo; he wouldn’t just send a rep. Boyer watched his union save jobs.
His good opinion of the Flints was shared by the president of Lancaster Glass, where the union also represented workers. Back in 1987, as Newell was taking over Anchor, the Lancaster Glass Flints talked strike because the company was asking for wage concessions. After negotiations, the Flints agreed to a 5 percent reduction for one year, followed by increases the following two years, for a net increase of 2 percent by the third year. They gave a little and got a little.
Company president Joe Ehnot praised them. “For the nearly forty years I have been associated with the many glassworkers throughout the country and the leadership provided by the American Flint Glass Workers’ Union, my respect for the employees and the union leadership has never wavered. They are responsible people trying to make a respectable living.”
But by 2003, so few Flints remained, thanks to plant closings and cutbacks across the industry like the ones at Anchor, the union was forced to seek safety within a bigger tribe. It voted to join the United Steelworkers. There was no joy in the decision.
The local Flint leadership barely had time to learn the way to Pittsburgh, where the Steelworkers were headquartered, before Galli’s seduction paid off. On March 12, 2004, one year after the school board’s vote to give up some of its own budget, Newell signed a purchase agreement to sell Anchor Hocking, Mirro, and a picture frame operation called Burnes of Boston to Cerberus Capital Management for $310 million. Anchor Hocking and Lancaster were about to enter the world of private equity.
Joseph Galli was fired from Newell the next year. In 2016, Newell Rubbermaid merged with Jarden, a collection of old brands and products that been taken down by the same kinds of financial maneuvers that took down Anchor Hocking: Ball Corporation (the old canning jar company), Rival Crock-Pots, First Alert smoke detectors, Sunbeam. Jarden was one of Sam Solomon’s former employers. The $15 billion deal created Newell Brands, now based in Hoboken, New Jersey. As of May 2016, Newell’s stock price still hadn’t reached its 1999 high.