Mark Kraft’s family holidays had been so loving and peaceful, and the first few days of the new year so positive, that his mother, used to a stream of doom in Lancaster, wondered, “What the heck’s going on here?” She even allowed herself to share in the general optimism slowly making its way through town. Then the MCU bashed in Mark’s front door.
He spent thirty hours in the jail on Main Street. Each hour dragged more slowly than the one before, until Mark wasn’t sure what to fear most: the hour that was scraping by, or the next one to come. He’d been a little dope-sick before, but nothing like this. He didn’t sleep and didn’t eat much. What he did eat, he threw up.
He pleaded not guilty to drug-related charges in Municipal Court and posted $1,000—10 percent of his $10,000 bail—and the $25 cost for his jail time, and when he was finally released, he wobbled east down Main Street, blowing chunks into the curb.
The only way he’d managed those thirty hours was by telling himself that as soon as he got out, he would find his stash in its secret spot and get high. Then the pain would go away. The pain was temporary. He wouldn’t feel this way forever. He could see it in his mind, how it would go: his arm, the syringe, the needle, the warm, cozy feeling of safety and contentment. He made for it as soon as he could. But the dope was gone. It had been discovered.
His father went back with him to the house on King Street to look over the damage and get a few things for his stay back with his parents. Mark opened a drawer in his bedroom. A gram the cops had missed shone up into his face like a bright sun through dark clouds of T-shirt. His father was right there and saw Mark palm it. Mark knew his father had seen. That was the bad part, his father’s knowing. Mark pulled the dope from a pocket, in front of his father, walked over to the toilet, dropped it in, and flushed. It was the first time in the two-plus years he’d been shooting heroin that he’d made a choice not to use it, and his dad had seen him do that. He thought, “We did it together.”
The sweetness of the moment didn’t last long. The sickness overwhelmed it.
By early February, he wasn’t throwing up anymore, but he’d never felt worse. He ached. Anxiety infested his mind like a thousand buzzing bees, making it impossible to sleep. He lay in bed for hours, feeling like he could crawl out of his skin. To get some sleep, he picked up some Xanax—Mark always knew where to get whatever drug he wanted—though he knew he’d be tested for drugs. The Xanax helped a little, but what he really wanted more than anything was dope. Any dope, from anybody. A Perc 30 would do.
* * *
At first, when his buddy Aaron Shonk, who sat in a cubicle out at Drew Shoe making phone calls to China, told Brian there was a warehouse job opening up, Brian dismissed the idea of applying. He couldn’t afford to make that move. The Drew job started at $10 an hour, $4.50 less than he made at Anchor.
Then he thought about it some more, weighed the goods of his job in Plant 1 against the bads. The heat was bad, the machines were dangerous. The longer he worked his H-28, the more he feared losing a body part or getting burned. Really, though, it wasn’t the heat or the machines. They were in lousy shape, for sure, but in his more honest moments, he’d admit there was a small kernel of attraction to them. He had to pay attention. The job focused his mind.
The attitude of the place bugged him more than the condition of the machines. His supervisors, the men who were supposed to be training him, weren’t interested in training him—not anymore. Brant, his floor operator, still stepped in when Brian needed a hand and tried to teach him, but the rest of his bosses seemed to have given up.
The whole place seemed to have given up. He counted five other guys on his shift alone who’d left. They were all about his age. A couple of them already had journeyman cards, but they left anyway. Guys like Brant, though, were stuck. They’d been there too long and were too old to quit. But they hadn’t been there long enough—and were too young anyway—to retire. Despite Plant 1’s long slide, it still offered the best-paying jobs in town—in the whole county, for that matter—to guys like Brant, who’d grown up poor, out in the country. They had no choice but to hold out and hope the place kept running until they could earn their release.
Brian didn’t want to wake up one day and be forty-five years old and working in a run-down glass factory or, even worse, be out of a job at forty-five because it had closed. Then what would he do? He might really have to move out to Hilltop and live like a hillbilly.
His own friends sometimes wondered why he worked there in the first place. Young people around town thought you had to be some sort of sucker to work at Anchor, even if you did make more money than you would emptying bedpans at the hospital or deep-frying chicken at Buffalo Wild Wings. Plant 1 had a reputation for hiring dope-sick addicts off the street to work in the sluer. People clocked in high. Some stepped out of prison and into the factory the way workers used to step into work right out of high school. Brian got the whole “second chance” thing, but he didn’t think EveryWare Global was hiring ex-cons to be noble; he thought the company took advantage of them because Plant 1 was their last resort.
There wasn’t any prestige in working at Anchor. The place possessed zero integrity, from top to bottom.
He weighed the shift work. By going to Drew—and just working normal hours during the day, not rotating days and late nights with a day off in between, which he spent sleeping or feeling groggy, fucking up his body clock—maybe he’d have more time for art, for cutting brush at Hilltop.
At Drew he’d ride a cherry picker to pull big boxes of shoes off shelves and unload the trucks that delivered them from China. It sounded pretty mindless to him—not like making something. The job would be a new start, though. Maybe he could work his way up into a more fulfilling position at Drew.
Brian teeter-tottered up and down, one moment deciding to quit, the next deciding to stay. His mind kept coming back to the shutdown. His calculations would be very different if not for that. Those two months squeezed the last drops of spirit out of Plant 1.
* * *
At about the time Solomon was hired, in February 2014, EveryWare Global hauled the weight of $290 million in loans up its profit-and-loss chart. Its total liabilities were in the realm of $400 million. The combined Anchor Hocking and Oneida owed that money to the likes of Deutsche Bank, Western Asset Management Company (WAMCO), Voya Investment Management Company, Nationwide Life Insurance, Nationwide Defined Benefit Master Trust, Nationwide Mutual Fire Insurance Company, CIFC Asset Management, and Wells Fargo. The agreements ratifying those loans were trussed by a variety of covenants, the conditions set by lenders. For example, EveryWare was forbidden from exceeding a certain ratio of debt to earnings. Breaching any of these covenants allowed the lenders to call the loans, which EveryWare would be unable to repay. In that event, the lenders could take the keys, shut down the business, and sell it off for parts if they chose to.
Just a few weeks into his new job, Solomon realized EveryWare was about to breach its covenants. Having become aware of the prospective breach, EveryWare would have to include notice of the danger in the 2013 annual report that was just about to be issued—the company’s first since going public—and in the earnings call to follow. Solomon didn’t want to communicate this, because it could trigger panic among investors, suppliers, and employees. So, in a bid to buy time, he and the board of EveryWare decided to delay the earnings release.
He used the time to fly to New York and ask the lenders for covenant relief. Solomon still thought Anchor Hocking—and EveryWare—had the bones to become a much larger, more profitable company—but first he’d have to convince the lenders to give him time.
Solomon entered the fifty-story Deutsche Bank headquarters at 60 Wall Street unsure of the reaction he’d face. By the time he sat down at a large table inside an upper-floor conference room looking out at the glass sides of other Financial District towers with other conference rooms containing large tables, he had no doubt. An employee of Deutsche—which had played the role of administrative agent to create the loan package for EveryWare—lenders’ representatives, and lawyers all sat on the other side of the table, facing him and not smiling.
The lenders had read the same public filings Solomon had before he took the job. They knew EveryWare could be a risky bet, but they specialized in risky bets. Like Cerberus, with its Madeleine arm, they made more money charging high interest rates to outfits like EveryWare. On the other hand, they weren’t in the business of financing lost causes. The risk was a calculated one, based on the numbers EveryWare, its executives, and its owners had provided.
When Solomon was looking at EveryWare back in December 2013, he saw the huge debt, but he also saw that, in April of that year, during its initial public-offering road show, the company told prospective investors it expected over $60 million in 2013 EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization), a proxy measure of how well the company operated. With good management and marketing—Solomon’s wheelhouse—you could keep a company going and slowly pay down that debt with $60 million in EBITDA. That amount was comfortably within the margin demanded by the loan covenants.
As it turned out, the results Solomon saw in March didn’t show $60 million in EBITDA, but more like $50 million. Where the $10 million went was a little mysterious. Also, the company was about to report that revenue was up in 2013, to $439.8 million, but it still lost money. Interest payments absorbed profits. Even so, Solomon believed he could salvage EveryWare on $50 million, though not if he couldn’t convince the lenders to forbear a covenant breach.
Solomon looked across the conference room table and announced to the people on the other side that EveryWare was nearly out of cash and would have to borrow more money from a revolving line of credit provided by Wells Fargo; was not paying its own vendors; and still had a warehouse full of inventory.
“We shocked the shit out of them,” he recalled. “‘How the fuck do we go from here to a breach, and nobody say anything?!’ There was a lot of venom in the room.” The bankers thought they’d been spoofed. Some accused EveryWare of manipulating the numbers. Some wanted to call the loans. Nobody blamed Solomon directly, since he’d been at the company for less than a month, but they wanted to know how the picture they had in their minds after reading the public filings and talking to EveryWare executives could be at such variance with the crisis they now faced.
As Solomon would later discover, the real EBITDA was not only less than $60 million, it was nothing like $50 million, either. EBITDA is a non-GAAP number, meaning it’s not computed using generally accepted accounting principles. Independent auditors don’t opine on EBITDA, making it susceptible to fudging. EveryWare’s real EBITDA, Solomon would later argue, was closer to $28 million.
After a series of meetings, the lenders decided not to take the keys, but they didn’t agree to covenant relief, either. By doing so, they handed responsibility squarely back to EveryWare’s majority shareholder, Monomoy Capital Partners. Meanwhile, analysts and investors were still waiting for an earnings announcement.
On March 31, Monomoy sent a credit agreement to Pierce Avenue committing Monomoy to buy $12 million worth of stock, debt, or other security should the company actually breach a covenant. If needed, the $12 million would be applied to equity to bring EveryWare back into covenant compliance. That same day, EveryWare issued a press release highlighting its earnings. It claimed the company made $51.5 million of EBITDA. There was a net loss of $17.4 million. The loss reflected all kinds of one-time and special items.
Solomon faced a dilemma about what to say on the earnings call. He had a choice between two truths. He could say he believed in the company, was excited about its prospects, and saw lots of potential. For all the neglect and decades of humiliation, Anchor Hocking was still one of the most important players in the American glassware industry. No other company made glass using as many different processes, or had as many different products sold to retailers, the food service industry, candlemakers, florists, winemakers, and distillers. Anchor was still the largest domestic maker of glass bakeware, not only under its own brand, but also Pyrex, which it made for a company called World Kitchen. Or he could say EveryWare Global was in the emergency room with a defibrillator pasted to its chest.
He didn’t have full control over his decision, or over his script. He’d made a mistake by agreeing to come into the company as “interim” CEO. His authority was clipped, his offices crowded by Monomoy’s John Stewart—to whom he had to report—and the consultants from Alvarez & Marsal who had Stewart’s ear. He couldn’t fire or hire on his own initiative. Yet he was now the face of the company, a public company with Securities and Exchange Commission oversight.
Erica Bartsch, an agent with Sloane and Company, Monomoy’s New York public relations firm, began the earnings call with the kind of straining, upbeat “Good morning, everyone!” that was designed to make listeners think the morning was fantastically good. She read some boilerplate disclaimers about forward-looking statements, then introduced Solomon.
He spoke in the tongues of business: “While getting to know the team, I met with key customers and suppliers. We also prioritized the initiatives that we believe will drive free-cash-flow generation, free cash that can be used to invest in the business and pay down debt. This, of course, is all underscored by iconic brands: Oneida and Anchor Hocking.”
He admitted that the team wasn’t satisfied with 2013’s full-year results. He provided the required warning about the possible breach of loan covenants but quickly softened the news with the cure. “Our largest shareholder provided the company with an equity commitment letter, which demonstrates their dedication and enthusiasm for the business. Their commitment also provides us the operational flexibility we need to maximize free cash flow and de-lever the business.” He used terms like “customer value,” “accelerate,” and “laser-sharp focus.” Then he introduced Bernard Peters, EveryWare’s CFO.
The analysts didn’t ask many questions about the numbers, but when they did, Peters replied with vague answers, refusing to provide specifics. Joseph Altobello, of Oppenheimer & Company, teed Solomon up to deliver an optimistic soliloquy by asking what drew the new interim CEO to the company.
“What drew me to EveryWare is this is a fantastic brand with a combination of manufacturing, sourcing capabilities, as well as deep, long-standing customer relationships. If you look at my prior experience, that’s exactly the kind of business that I successfully transformed at Coleman, a division of Jarden. And also the kind of experience I used to reinvigorate the Craftsman tool business at Sears Holdings. I see all of the right foundational elements for this to be a very successful company going forward. We simply, in the near term, have to focus on the blocking and tackling necessary to build a solid foundation for growth.”
This may have been puffery—and Solomon knew the legal line between permissible puffery and lying—but none of these sentences, on their own, were untrue. They just didn’t add up to anything. They were air. In the press release of the day before, the one people in Lancaster saw, he was quoted as saying, “I’m excited about the company’s prospects.”
The $12 million commitment from Monomoy wasn’t used. Unfortunately for Anchor Hocking, its workers, and Lancaster, it wasn’t used because it didn’t come close to filling the financial chasm. Sam Solomon’s more immediate problem turned out to be not the breach, but cash: EveryWare ran out.
Solomon was told that, despite its debts, EveryWare had plenty of liquidity, thanks mainly to the Wells revolving loan. But Wells Fargo was under no obligation to keep lending money out of the revolver. When EveryWare asked for $20 million more, the bank turned off the spigot. Of all the problems he faced, Solomon said, “I didn’t expect that we would run into the big aha! of ‘What do you mean you don’t have any more money?’ Nothing shuts down a party like running out of alcohol.”
* * *
On Thursday, May 15, 2014, six weeks after the earnings call, Chris Cruit worked the early shift. He was a burn-off specialist. Burn-off men weren’t the highest-paid employees in the plant, but they weren’t the lowest, either. Cruit liked his job, but what he really wanted to do was show-biz wrestle. The wrestling he’d done on a small-time circuit was written on his face. It was a dark, handsome face, but his nose had been rearranged, a tooth had gone missing, and his ears showed the early blooms of cauliflower. A guy could knock around the Midwest for a few years and scratch out a living getting slammed into wrestling mats, but Cruit knew he was never going to be Hulk Hogan. Attitude wasn’t the problem: He was a naturally sweet guy, but he’d been a bouncer once and had learned to fake badassery. He couldn’t fake his size, though, or his age.
Cruit was a born-and-raised west-sider. He lived right around the corner from Plant 1. He enjoyed giving wrestling lessons to some kids in the neighborhood, so he began to think about starting his own wrestling school and about maybe getting into the wrestling-show-promotion racket by bringing some touring wrestlers into the fairgrounds. He needed money for that, though, plus he had a wife and son to support. Cruit tried selling cars, “but you gotta be a special kind of person to sell cars, and I didn’t do so good,” especially once the Great Recession hit. Cruit estimated he’d walked by Plant 1 “eight billion times,” but had never thought of working there. Then, in September 2008, he applied and was hired, and had worked there steadily ever since.
His shift ended at 2:30, and he left the plant. Cruit had been home a couple of hours when his phone started to ring. “They were going, ‘Hey! Anchor Hocking’s gonna shut down.’ And I was like, ‘Whaddya mean Anchor Hocking’s gonna shut down?’ ‘They shut down. They’re closed, and they don’t know if they’re gonna reopen.’”
While Cruit was on the phone, Joe Boyer stood in a small space by the guard shack at the main Plant 1 entrance. He and some other union leaders had been called off the floor for a special meeting. By now Boyer had worked under three different ownerships. Not much of anything surprised him anymore. But when the plant bosses started handing confidentiality agreements to the assembled union leaders, Boyer knew something surprising was about to happen and that it wasn’t going to be good. He didn’t want to sign the agreement, but the bosses said that he and anyone else who refused would have to leave. Until everybody signed, they couldn’t even know what it was they were supposed to keep secret. Boyer thought that was ass-backwards, but he signed it.
Unbeknownst to Boyer and the other union men, as they were signing their names to confidentiality agreements, operations executives were walking through the plant, telling workers like Brant, Swink, and Brian to go home. The plant was shutting down. Rank-and-file workers thought the union officers, now separated from them in a secret meeting, must have been warned. But the union officers had no idea what was happening, either.
The agreements Boyer was forced to sign said the reps “weren’t allowed to discuss any specifics with any of our people,” he recalled. “They were giving us facts and figures on some of the money, what was going on. We were not allowed to discuss any of that with anybody. While they are telling us all that, what was going on, they are shutting the place down!”
A “big-time” lawyer came in and started talking numbers. Boyer and the other union reps were skeptical. They’d long murmured among themselves, not always joking, that management kept two sets of books—one they showed the union and the real one. Whatever the real numbers were, they knew Anchor Hocking had been mismanaged for years, and now the big-time lawyer was telling them EveryWare Global had run out of money. And there was another message: If the plant was ever going to reopen, “they were gonna want concessions from us, and all this, and we were gonna have to make up our mind what was gonna happen.”
With the exception of the Cerberus furloughs, Anchor Hocking had gone 109 years without a long-term unplanned shutdown. It remained open through every economic, political, and war crisis. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Anchor Hocking cushioned Lancaster. In 1933, its payroll of 2,565 employees amounted to $1.8 million. Now it was closing, maybe for good. More than nine hundred people suddenly lost paychecks.
When Solomon issued a release saying the shutdown might last four weeks, Lancaster clung to that figure as if it were gospel. A councilman estimated that if the shutdown lasted a month, the city would lose $75,000 in income tax revenue—a significant enough dent in a small town’s budget to require cutbacks in the police, fire, and streets departments. Thank goodness, though, it would only be for four weeks. Four weeks was bad, but manageable. What would happen beyond that was anybody’s guess.
Anchor’s workers, salaried and hourly alike, felt ignored by the residents of the city that used to celebrate them. Now, some in Lancaster shrugged as if to say, “Well, finally.”
Others exhumed the old Lancaster civic initiative and tried to buck up the workers. Stores offered discounts. Restaurants donated a free lunch to people with Anchor Hocking ID cards. The local office of Ohio’s Job and Family Services set up a dedicated phone line to teach workers how to file for unemployment. It gave résumé tips and helped with job searches.
Jeff Couch, a firefighter, started a group called Save Anchor Hocking. His dad had worked for Anchor twenty-five years before but had been fired in one of the layoffs, plunging the family into poverty. So Couch knew what the workers faced.
“I started the group because this is not just about Anchor Hocking,” he told me. “I am tired of watching the country go downhill, and nobody ever takes the time to stop and say, ‘Hey! No! What is going on is unacceptable.’ I decided maybe we could try to do something.”
Thirty-four people joined his group. Couch and a few others decided the only way to save the company was to buy it. Lancaster had built its own hotel, its own hospital, its own gas company, and its own schools—and Couch didn’t see any insurmountable obstacle barring it from taking over its biggest private employer, not if everybody banded together and pooled their money. He wasn’t sure how much money a buyout would require, but somebody had to do something. He turned to online crowdfunding. Save Anchor Hocking raised pledges for a few thousand dollars.
Mayor Dave Smith offered to let the company extend utility payments, but there wasn’t much more the town could do. The city didn’t have $20 million. May turned into June. There was still no word on when the plant might fire up. Wall Street analysts predicted doom.
On June 6, three weeks after the shutdown, EveryWare sent a WARN (Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act) letter to Mayor Smith, the Fairfield County Commissioners, and Ohio Job and Family Services stating that while some lender relief had been extended to June 30, there was no savior in sight.
Federal law requires WARN letters be sent to labor and government officials sixty days before a plant closing or layoff, not three weeks into one. (Cerberus was forced to pay workers $480,000 for not providing a WARN notice when it closed that Connellsville, Pennsylvania, bottle plant.) There are exceptions to the WARN requirements, including “unforeseeable business circumstances.”
Anyone who knew what Solomon and Monomoy knew would have a rough time arguing that EveryWare’s situation was unforeseeable, but Monomoy had a history of flouting the WARN Act. In July 2008, Monomoy bought Kurdziel Industries, an iron foundry located in the village of Rothbury, Michigan, that manufactured cast parts for construction equipment makers like John Deere. Monomoy changed the name of the business to Carlton Creek Ironworks and swept up state and local tax breaks and funds to train employees.
When it announced the purchase, Monomoy partner Justin Hillenbrand said, “This is a great deal for us. Carlton Creek is a market leader for iron castings that will continue to be essential to infrastructure repair and expansion in North America over the next 10 years. After planned improvements in manufacturing and sourcing, Carlton Creek will be better positioned to continue providing its global customers with a high-quality, cost-effective product and should grow substantially over the next few years as it re-acquires volume from Chinese foundries. This transaction is a great win for the company’s customers and employees, for the state of Michigan, and for North American manufacturing.”
Five months later, in December, Monomoy began mass layoffs, leading to a complete closure. More than two hundred employees lost their jobs, crippling Rothbury. In September 2009, Carlton Creek workers sued Monomoy for violating the WARN Act. As is typical of PE firms, Monomoy argued that it was not the employer, though it owned the company. Carlton Creek was the employer.
John Philo, an attorney with the Maurice and Jane Sugar Law Center for Economic and Social Justice, who represented the workers, argued that Monomoy was indeed the employer. “The PE folks are making the decisions,” Philo told me.
Monomoy settled the case out of court. It later settled another one of Philo’s WARN cases, this one involving Hess Industries of Niles, Michigan. “My impression is that they make that decision because they do not want to be bogged down in litigation for two or three years,” Philo said. “One thing with the WARN Act is that it’s fairly clear: You’ve either given the notice or you did not. Each time they were offering the fig leaf of ‘unexpected business circumstances,’ but if we got into trial, that would require them to show all the business stuff in the background, and they don’t want that public discussion.”
EveryWare’s board met three days later, on June 9. First it had to figure out what to do about Sam Solomon. He’d been “interim” for six months and had found the uncertainty damaging. The board offered Solomon a new employment agreement, making him CEO and president of EveryWare Global, with a base salary of $600,000, stock options, bonuses, and $100,000 in moving expenses.
Perhaps because the incongruity between that decision and the alarm around Lancaster was so jarring, the board also announced that a few workers would be called back to Plant 1. That wasn’t much to celebrate, though. There was no mention of how long those few people would have jobs. EveryWare also announced that it would “complete a reduction in force at its Lancaster, Ohio, facility over the next few weeks and will seek additional ways to conserve cash and reduce expenses through continued cost cutting measures.”
The people of Lancaster, largely in the dark about the goings-on inside Anchor and EveryWare—even middle management wasn’t aware of many details—developed theories about how the situation had become so dire. Some blamed China, Mexico, and cheap imports. Some suggested that Anchor Hocking was just old and tired, ready for the fossil beds. Maybe it was the housing bubble and the recession, or the unions, or Obama. It was complicated, that was for sure.
* * *
On June 12, local ministers and other volunteers held a rally for the workers on the West School playground, one block from Anchor Hocking’s front gate. There was food—hot dogs, popcorn—and a bounce house for the kids. Police chief Dave Bailey, Mayor Smith, the fire chief, and the sheriff all attended. Service groups set up stations to explain how workers could find help to pay bills, secure health insurance, and qualify for food assistance.
Michele Ritchlin, executive director of the West After School Program, loaded up a little cart with a canopy and some pamphlets on the program’s free summer lunches and wheeled it across Garfield Street and onto the playground.
The tutoring program started by Rosemary Hajost and the other volunteers had grown to meet an ever-increasing need. Children on the west side didn’t just require tutoring; they had to be fed. They needed a safe place to be after school. They needed attention—and not just for a day, but for all five days of the school week. The program expanded all across the city, too, because the problems of the west-side children had spread outward to all compass points.
Now headquartered in a converted house on Garfield Street, just across from the West School playground, it survived on government grants, donations, and income from after-school childcare services. Finding money to operate was a constant struggle that required all the doggedness Ritchlin, a thirty-nine-year-old body builder and a brash blond whirl of energy, possessed. Now the Anchor shutdown threatened to stress her little agency more than ever.
Ritchlin’s grandfather, father, and uncle had worked at Anchor Hocking. But that was then. When she first heard about the closing, she thought, “Oh my God, things are just going to get worse.” Already too many of the children she served had one or both parents in jail, out of work, addicted. They went home when her center closed at six o’clock to not much of anything, including food. Or they were being raised by an aunt, or a grandparent, who was doing the best she could but who was probably poor herself. Fairfield County had one of the highest rates of children in foster care in the state of Ohio.
She handed out flyers to the employees at the playground rally. A free lunch for the kids wasn’t going to solve anything; she knew that. But it was something. “Those people were devastated,” she thought. “What are they going to do? They live paycheck to paycheck anyway.”
The sheriff and the police chief picked up a microphone and said a few words of encouragement. Then a minister took the mic. He asked the crowd to pray for the workers, for Anchor Hocking, for the owners of EveryWare Global. The attendees on the playground bowed their heads.
Brian wasn’t there. He spent his forced time off skating, listening to music, making art in the studio, and out at Hilltop, where he began gathering rocks for a cabin’s foundation.
In July, EveryWare and Monomoy presented the union with an ultimatum. Monomoy would provide liquidity by investing $20 million in EveryWare, in return for preferred shares and transaction fees, but only if the unions in both Lancaster and Monaca agreed to roll back wages, to give up the company contribution to their 401(k) plans, and to pay increased health insurance premiums. If the unions didn’t agree, Monomoy would shutter Anchor Hocking.
Some workers thought Monomoy was bluffing and wanted to call it. (Solomon himself wasn’t sure if it was a bluff or not.) Others were just angry and wanted to use their vote as a middle finger to management. “All or nothing,” Chris Nagle recalled of the terms. “Presser called me up on the phone,” he continued, referring to Monomoy cofounder Stephen Presser. “‘Nagle,’ he says, ‘if you can get the concessions in Lancaster, I will help you out.’” Nagle phoned Steelworker union reps. A couple of them “was sayin’, ‘Fuck them. We’re gonna put ’em down. [Any concessions] are just a Band-Aid anyway. We’re gonna put ’em down.’ And I said, ‘Oh, fine. I wanna job at Anchor Hocking. You have to get your ass out of bed and start talkin’ to Presser or we will find us another international member now.’”
Negotiations continued until “Presser called me on the phone and said, ‘Nagle, you know, by the end of the day, if I don’t have concessions in my hand, I will not give them twenty million dollars.’” Presser told Nagle he would “lock the door Tuesday at noon and liquidate the assets of the whole plant.”
Lancaster approved the cuts. The union at Monaca rejected them. EveryWare reneged on its word and reopened both plants anyway, leaving the Lancaster workers feeling like fools and Nagle and the rest of the Plant 1 union leadership discredited among the rank and file.
The deal was finalized on Wednesday, July 30. The four-week shutdown had lasted two and a half months. Both Anchor Hocking and Lancaster had their reprieve, but the union was angry, and EveryWare had alienated its own customers. Winemakers and distillers lacked bottles from Monaca, fouling up their production lines. Candlemakers didn’t have glass holders, so they couldn’t ship. Retailers wondered if they should start buying overseas. Maybe China or Mexico would be more reliable.
Lancaster’s state and federal representatives, both Republican and Democrat, had been mostly absent during the shutdown, leaving workers feeling abandoned. But the next day, Ohio’s Democratic U.S. senator, Sherrod Brown, issued a platitude-filled press release applauding “both management and members of the United Steelworkers for finding common ground and working toward shared success.” Brown tried to take a little of the credit, highlighting a letter he’d written to Monomoy back in June. The union guys in Plant 1 laughed when they read it.
CFO Bernard Peters resigned on September 17, effective October 3. On its face, his resignation was an odd move. The employment agreement he’d signed stipulated that, unless he was terminated for cause or resigned before his contract was up—which he’d just done—he would be entitled to a generous severance payment. By resigning, he’d forfeited the severance. He’d worked at EveryWare for less than two years. In 2013, his first year, Peters made $1,128,998, most of it in stock awards and performance bonuses linked to achieving EBITDA numbers.
To replace Peters, EveryWare contracted with Alvarez & Marsal to provide a new CFO. The company agreed to pay A&M $31,680 per week, more than Brian Gossett would make in all of 2014. In 1985, before the sale to Newell, the average Anchor Hocking hourly employee made about $9.33 per hour, almost $21 in 2016 dollars. Even before the concessions, the current generation of Anchor factory workers made less than the previous one had. Now they made less still—Brian earned $14.55—and had no retirement plan.
When the shutdown was first announced, the Eagle-Gazette published an editorial insisting that “Anchor Hocking Owes Lancaster Explanation.” “We were shocked and disturbed at just how little the company seemed to care about its employees or the city.” Community spirit, the paper argued, “at least from the corporate level, seems to have dried up in recent years.” Lancaster still wanted its company’s love.
Solomon smiled at the naïveté of such thinking, but he understood it. Most Americans held old ideas about how The System really worked.
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The shutdown was six months in the past, but the sting of it lingered and festered until it metastasized to the point that some Plant 1 employees were ready to walk out on any pretext. They no longer believed Sam Solomon. “He’s just a cheerleader for the company,” some said. Some of them didn’t believe their own local president, Nagle, or the rest of the Steelworkers union. The old Flints would never have stood for the raw deal; the Flints were just a tiny speck to the Steelworkers. The Steelworkers didn’t give a crap about them. It seemed they were always the ones giving back. A few wanted to take down the company out of spite, just to be able to tell themselves they walked out like men. Being jobless afterwards would just about be worth it. Most, though, reacted with learned helplessness, keeping their heads down and going to work. They had families to think about.
Brian did not have a family, and the more he thought about it, the more he started to think that whether he could afford it or not, he wanted to quit Anchor and go to Drew. He still worried about earning less money, but he figured the company always moved backwards anyway, forcing its workers to march backwards with it. Brian did the math and realized that, after the previous summer’s concessions, the forced furloughs, and the bigger health insurance bite, he wouldn’t be making that much less money at Drew anyway.
Telling Brant was the worst part. Brant had invested time in Brian, and Brian considered him a friend and mentor. They’d gone deer hunting together out at Hilltop. They were both standing on the platform around the H-28, working on the machine, when he said it. “He comes up to me and is like, ‘Did you get that job?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah,’ and he was like, ‘Good.’ I could tell he was disappointed, but he couldn’t hold it against me.”
Leaving Anchor wasn’t quite as hard as the breakup with Renee, but he already missed Plant 1. Why did it have to happen? He couldn’t figure it out. They had to be making money. The company was always saying it was losing money, but Brian saw through that bullshit. He didn’t claim to understand the politics of the place—he had only the vaguest idea that something called Monomoy controlled it—but it was open, wasn’t it? It wouldn’t be open if they weren’t making money. Why’d they reopen it after the shutdown if they weren’t? “Somebody’s making money,” Brian concluded, “and it’s off the sweat of other people.”