By Keith Knauss and Michael Matuszak

A description of this work follows, the full text can be found in Chapter 5 of the book, Grand Designs, the Impact of Corporate Strategies on Workers, Unions and Communities. edited by Charles Craypo and Bruce Nissen, ILR Press, Ithaca New York, 1993. It is available through academic bookstores and libraries.

This case study is from 1975- 1985 is by Keith Knauss and Michael Matuszak, participant observers in the events they describe. It involves Ingersoll-Rand's (I-R) shutdown of a heavy bearings plant in South Bend, Indiana. As they explain, the shutdown was part of a plan to relocate and consolidate the operations of I-R's Torrington subsidiary from northern (union) plants to southern (nonunion) plants. The Entire global bearings manufacturing industry was being consolidated and automated as a result of increased competition from Japanese producers and technological advances that enabled major companies such as SKF of Sweden, the world's largest bearings manufacturer, to build factories in which steel came in one end and finished bearings came out the other in a continuous, on-line production process. The results were global overcapacity, plant closings, and job losses. During the five years after 1972 during which SKF rationalized its bearings operation worldwide, twenty thousand jobs were eliminated in the industry . Thus, the question for Torrington, the second largest domestic producer behind Timkin and sixth in the world, was not whether to modernize its manufacturing operations but how to do so: by renovating existing facilities in the Midwest and Northeast or by constructing new plants in the South and using different work forces.

In the early 1960's, Torrington revealed a corporate strategy of relocating plants from high-wage, high-tax locations to states offering "competitive labor costs, realistic government regulations, prudence in tax structures and cooperative attitudes in the community and among its leaders." (Torrington Register, May 31, 1961). This policy was, if anything, intensified after Ingersoll-Rand acquired Torrington and included the relocation of its South Bend bearings operation to South Carolina. In the process, Torrington's management led everyone to believe that the northern plant could be saved through hard work and cooperation, although internal company documents intercepted by workers and made available to local union officials revealed that the decision to relocate had already been made.

Nevertheless, neither elected union officers nor city officials were prepared to challenge the company before or after the closing, apparently in the belief that so doing would alienate Torrington and other businesses and reduce the prospects of workers, union and community either retaining existing jobs with Torrington or attracting new manufacturing. Moreover, Torrington was able to persuade union workers to implement a new "cell-manufacturing" production process before it closed the plant and transferred the cell machinery and know-how to South Carolina

(Grand Designs Bruce Nissen and Charles Craypo, ed., ILR press, Ithaca NY, 1993