Document oaGVvn6rXnZaY5Lz7zwyK423

A Worker-owned Mine Shows Bright Prospects VERMONT ASBESTOS GROUP By William L. Claiborne Photographs by Richard Howard OMfU ----- hen the New York-based GAF W Corp. announced last year that it would shut down its 55 million asbestos mill near Lowell, a pall of dejection hung over the Belvidere Mountain valley like the clouds of lime-rich dust do in the summertime when the big diesel ore trucks roar down the hillside on their run to the clattering and clanking rock crush ing machines below. Quarry foreman Romeo Myott remem bers that the news hit like a sledgeham mer blow, or "the kind of feeling you can only get by having 23 years of work go down the drain." Others among the 280 GAF employees Company truck hauls rock from quarrj which will eventually he processed into asbestos fiber. thought in more practical terms of where thev could find work in a mountainous, undeveloped region of Northern Ver mont where the unemployment rate al ready was ov er 15 per cent. But maintenance supervisor John J. Lupien, a Quebec native and veteran of other mines that had either been played out or dosed because of bankruptcy, began thinking in another direction en tirely. "1 felt sorry for the boys and felt some thing had to be done." Lupien recalled. Fifteen months later, Lupien and the mine's other workers, with the support of Vermont's Agency for Development and SPRING 1976 9 t i i i \ Community Affairs, raised 52 million and took control of the plant, making it one of the largest emplovee-ovvned manufactur ing companies in the country. \ow the mine is more profitable than ever before, and the new owners are talk ing about 20 years or more of successful operations. W'hat's more, the employees' man agement of the mine has neutralized a potentially problem-plagued union labor situadon and has cut costs so much that embarrassed GAF conglomerate officials reportedly fired the executive who origi nally- recommended the shutdown. Seven members of the plant's labor union, local, including two ranking union officer', sit on the board of directors of r. company, called the Vermont A-re-to- Group Inc. Also, the popular maintenance supervisor. Lupien. is chairman of the firm's board, and all of the cmriovees -- from plant manager to riant amtor -- are stockholders. i t'mnk ue ha\e a prett\ -table labor situation/' said board chairman Lupien, with some understatement, as he sat in hi; tool-cluttered office in the planttruck garage and wiped motor oil from his hands. Mine uvrkers on lunch break, above, talk business: thei/'re also stockholders. At Since negotiations for the takeover right, di/namitcd rock is loaded otto truck. began, production in the mine has been maximum and cost; have been declining so rapidiv that the new management in the plant, soon found himself cast in an its first month; of operation barely had to unfamiliar role. touch the S400.00P in working capital it "Here we had a bunch of men who borrowed with a U S. Small Business have a helluva time dealing with Administration loan guarantee. thousands of dollars, and suddenly we're Equipment repair costs, in particular, talking about millions," said Lupien, who have dropped dramatically as the mine conceded he was more comfortable him workers began demonstrating a new self with arranging three-vear auto loans found respect with their own heavy than dealing with Wall Street financial in machinery-. stitutions. "Thev realize that we nil own this With the help of the Vermont De equipment now. 1: ; amazing how careful velopment Agency, the employees group people can be when thev want to," said V first obtained a one-year extension of the Lupien., "We don t have much business ^ EPA deadline, to March 15, 1975. exrerl-mce but we know what we re 'That was critical. This deal never dome he adde.t would have gotten off the ground with Thu- -iiccms -- -. began on Jan 31. out it," recalled Donald Webster, secre 1974, -.-.hen in a terse announcement tary' of the agency which funded a feasi GAF an-v'tinCi-h mat it planned to clo-e bility study that eventually led to the the nla-t rath-.: --vw, -pend more than SI state guarantee of the huge VAG Inc. million to :tiee* L S Environmental Pro bank loans. tection A-cencv ann-ooilution standards. In the midst of the talks with the fed The plant had been -operating for 42 eral officials, which Webster recalled years, and GAF had controlled it for the were not going well, the EPA inexplicably last sewn. sent state officials a warning that the na Lupien, who almost immediately tion was running dangerously low on its began talking with workers about buying supply of long, "hooker"-type asbestos 10 VERMONT LIFE I fibers, which are essential in the man ufacture of chlorine. The state officials, noting that Vermont is prarticallv the sole producer of such fibers, threw the warning back at the tedI eral agency, and the emissions deadline | was extended soon afterward. .j At the same time. Lupien began to abandon his truck garage duties and was flying to New York and Boston to talk with banking executives about a loan. "We hit the bnck wall manv, mamtimes. They didn't exactlv laugh at us, but their answers were, in effect, a laugh at what we were trying to do," Lupien re called. Eventually, a consortium of seven Boston and Vermont banks agreed to loan the purchase price and the deal headed toward a closing. "Going to the banks and asking for millions of dollars was a new experience. 1 learned something about the way the bigshots operate," Lupien said. He also learned a few things about set ting up a corporation, issuing stock, es tablishing a corporate hierarchy and writ ing a prospectus. Two thousand shares of stock totaling 5100,000 were sold to employees and their families, and a 15-member board of directors was named, including seven hourly wage earners, seven salaried em ployees and one outside businessman. The directors include a steam shovel operator, a mechanic, a yard man, a warehouseman, two ore testers and a shift mechanic. The salaried emplovees on the board include the general man ager, a purchasing agent, the mill super intendent, the quarry foreman, a development engineer and Lupien. After screening a half-dozen appli cants, Lupien hired as his general man ager a Vermont accountant and bus inessman, Gerald Hammang, who subse quently became the firm's president. The 280 shareholders are evenly dis tributed among the labor force, with most employees owning from six to ten 550 certificates and none owning much more than 100. "It onlv took two weeks to sell the stock, which is pretty good when you consider that monev doesn't grow on trees around here," Lupien said. Early in the negotiating stages, Lupien said, it was decided to organize the com pany in the traditional corporate struc ture rather than try to establish a coopera tive management. "We decided you can't have all the stockholders making the day-to-day de cisions. Somebody has to be boss, and that's okay, as long as we know who owns the company," he said. The makeup of the company, Lupien acknowledged, has created some corpo rate anomalies. In theorv. Lupien. as board chairman, could fire president Hammang, and Hanmarc could fire maintenance supervisor Lupien. "We don't worn about r-.o-e thins- much There's no cn-'f'c: v stav clo-e to the rrv~ in-- .' -aid Lupien, who onlv trtrc.tuer: -tr.v.s into the administrative offices sc\ erai hun dred feet awav from the truck carase Hammang, too - .tererc--a .-wire Lupien "the man no real!'. - -e-ron-i- ble for the mine still operating Dunng a recent visit to V AG Inc board chairman Lurien was seen, oxer- hauling a truck transmission, installing some high-voltaee power line- in. the maintenance garage and climbm.c m.t. a nt to we:.-, or. a he.v. v ctum.p true-, the also sent track et the riant s eve-',, pto- from tour recent nnce increase- a-r-.-- :o- in the Canadian, ntarse: - n uce-t With the dancer of a strike at \ hC. [nCi almost - me .vrr;-'- tourd svm.rathetic customers ru ..r.c tor mw w*'M ` fNtnfiMwniiHWfttfM, v its survival as an employee-owned enter prise. "They really want to keep us in busi ness. Thev're paying their bills faster than thev normallv would." said Lupien, adding that one big corporate customer deposited 5100.000 in a bank and told VAG Inc. to draw from the account as it shipped asbestos. Oddly. GAF Corp. has become one of the major customers of the companv it sold out to the employees it had planned to lay off. WAG Inc., according to companv officials, has established a good relation ship with the environmentalists, and is in the process of installing SI million worth of filtering and vacuuming equipment to meet federal standards. "In 42 years, this plant has had 1,800 employees, but we've had only 17 work ers come down with lung disease. We care about our people and want to make it safe here, but we also know that the atmosphere in Vermont makes it safer for this kind of operation than other places in the world," Lupien said. Despite projections by GAF that the mine could be exhausted of topqualitv asbestos in a few rears, recent rests con ducted bv the no. owner- to prom ise a longer lire tor VAG inu Two open pit ore bodies assure that operations can continue for 12 years, Lupien said, and recent core samples have -hewn that un derground veins are good tor another ten. years after that. Commenting on the company's rela tions with the union, the United Cement, Lime and Gypsum Workers,. Lupien thinks the worker-stockholders^mav de cide to drop out of the international and form a local employees association. " 'They' is 'we' now. These guvs bought a $5 million mine for $100,000, and thev know thev have a pretty good deal 20ing. Thev'Il know how m.ucn, tnev can atford to pay when the car.tract comes up " Lupien said. He auc.ec: "'A e re prcurt o: v. nr: - r *. t put tocethcr Ml admit it : r ; to explain to the employees he wasn : sure the mine ta.vcc-:: ecu.a be repeated without the cooreram- r .-r.-t found :r. rural Vermont. "I know this kind of thing coulrt neve: happen in New York, because perple are too indifferent to each other. \ou have to live in this kind of job and care tor each other's well being to know what I'm talk ing about," Mvott said. ^