He went in the visitors’ entrance and caught the old familiar smell of welding and soldering, of hot metal. It took him back to visits to his father at work, of dog-day summers in high school and college spent working on the line.
The plump girl who sat at the battered old desk and handed out safety glasses, greeted visitors, and answered the phone, did a double take. “Good morning, Mr. Conover.”
“Morning, Beth.” Beth-something-Italian. He signed the log, noticed Scott had signed in about twenty minutes earlier along with someone else whose signature was illegible.
“Boy, both you and Mr. McNally in the space of an hour. Something going on I should know about?”
“No, in fact, I’m looking for Mr. McNally-any idea where he is?”
“No, sir. He had a visitor with him, though.”
“Catch the other guy’s name?”
“No, sir.” She looked ashamed, as if she hadn’t been doing her job. But Nick couldn’t blame her for not checking the ID of the CFO’s guest too carefully.
“Did Scott say where they were going?”
“No, sir. Sounded like Mr. McNally was giving a tour.”
“Brad take them around?” Brad Kennedy was the plant manager, who gave tours only to the VIPs.
“No, sir. Want me to call Brad for you?”
“That’s okay, Beth.” He put on a pair of dorky-looking safety glasses.
He’d forgotten how deafening the place was. A million square feet of clattering, pounding, thudding metal. As he entered the main floor, keeping to the “green mile,” as it was called-the green-painted border where you’d be safe from the Hi-Lo electric lift trucks that barreled down the aisles at heedless speeds-he could feel the floor shake. That meant the thousand-ton press, which stamped out the bases of the Symbiosis chair control panel, was operating. The amazing thing was that the thousand-ton press was all the way across the factory floor, clear on the other end, and you could still feel it go.
The place filled him with pride. This was the real heart of Stratton-not the glitzy headquarters building with its silver-fabric cubicles and flat-panel monitors and all the backstabbing. The company’s heartbeat was the regular thud of the thousand-ton behemoth, which sent vibrations up your spine as you passed through. It was here, where you still found some of those antique, dangerous, hydraulic-powered machines that could bend steel three-quarters of an inch thick, the exact same one on which his father had worked, bending steel, a seething monster that could take your hand off if you weren’t careful. His dad had in fact lost the tip of his ring finger to the old green workhorse once, which caused him more embarrassment than anger, because he knew it was his fault. He must have felt that the brake machine, after all those years of a close working relationship, had been disappointed in him.
As he walked, he looked for Scott, and the more he looked, the angrier he got. The idea that Scott, who worked for him, a guy he’d hired, would dare shelve projects, block funding, change vendors without consulting him-that was insubordination of the most egregious sort.
Four hundred hourly workers in this plant, and another hundred or so salaried employees, all turning out chairs for the Armani-clad butts of investment bankers and hedge-fund managers, the Prada-clad rumps of art directors.
He was always impressed by how clean the factory floor was kept, free of oil spills, each area clearly marked with hanging signs. Each section had its own safety board, marked green for a safe day, yellow for a day with a minor injury, red for an injury requiring hospitalization. Good thing, he thought grimly, he didn’t have one of those hanging in his house. What was the color for death?
He was looking for two men in business suits. They shouldn’t be hard to find here, among the guys (and a few women) in jeans and T-shirts and hard hats.
Periodic messages flashed on the TV monitors, a steady stream of propaganda and morale-building. THE STRATTON FAMILY CARES ABOUT YOUR FAMILY-TALK TO YOUR BENEFITS ADVISER. And: THE NEXT INSPECTOR IS OUR CUSTOMER. And then: STRATTON SALUTES JIM VEENSTRA-FENWICK PLANT-25 YEARS OF SERVICE.
A radio was blasting out Fleetwood Mac’s “Shadows” from the progressive-build station where the Symbiosis chairs were assembled. Nick had borrowed the process from Ford and pretty much forced it on the workers, who resisted any further dumbing-down of their jobs. They liked building the whole chair themselves, and who could blame them? They liked the old piecework incentives. Now, one chair was assembled every fifty-four seconds as a light cycled from green to amber to red, signaling the workers to finish up. This plant turned out ten thousand Symbiosis chairs a week.
He jogged past the in-line washer that cleaned the oil off the chair-control covers and then sent them clattering down into an orange supply tub. He couldn’t help slowing a bit to admire the robotic machine, a recent acquisition, that took sized and straightened wire stock, made five perfect bends, and then cut it, all in twelve seconds. In front of a press that made tubes out of eight-foot steel coils for the stacking chairs, a guy wearing green earplugs was asleep, obviously on break.
The floor supervisor, Tommy Pratt, saw him, threw him a wave, came hurrying up. Nick couldn’t politely avoid the guy.
“Hey! Mr. Conover!” Tommy Pratt was a small man who looked like he’d been compacted from a larger man: everything about him seemed dense. Even his hair was dense, a helmet of tight brown curls. “Haven’t seen you down here in a while.”
“Couldn’t stay away,” Nick said, raising his voice to be heard above the din. “You seen Scott McNally?”
Pratt nodded, pointed toward the far end of the floor.
“Thanks,” Nick shouted back. He gestured with his chin at an orange tub stacked high with black chair casters. An unusual sight-Scott’s new inventory-control system made sure there was never a backlog. Keeping too much inventory on hand was a cardinal sin against the religion of Lean Manufacturing. “What’s this?” he said.
“Yeah, Mr. Conover-we’ve been having a problem with, like, every other lot of those casters. You know, they’re vended parts-”
“Seriously? That’s a first. I’ll have someone call Lenny at Peerless-no, in fact, I’ll call Lenny myself.” Peerless, in St. Joseph, Michigan, had been manufacturing chair casters for Stratton since forever. Nick vaguely remembered getting a couple of phone messages from Lenny Bloch, the CEO of Peerless. “Uh, no, sir,” Pratt said. “We switched to another vendor last month. Chinese company, I think.”
“Huh?”
“The bitch of it is, sir, with Peerless, if we ever got a bad batch, which hardly ever happened by the way, he’d just truck us a new lot overnight. Now we gotta deal with container ships, you know, takes forever.”
“Who switched vendors?”
“Well, I think Brad said it was Ted Hollander who insisted on it. Brad put up a fight, but you know, the word came down, we’re cutting costs and all that.”
Ted Hollander was vice president for control and procurement, and one of Scott McNally’s direct reports. Nick clenched his jaw.
“I’ll get back to you on that,” he said in a voice of corporate cordiality. “When I tell the guys to look at cost containment, some of them go a little overboard.” Nick turned to go, but Pratt touched his elbow. “Uh, Mr. Conover, one more thing. I hope I’m not driving you away here-I don’t want you to think all we’re ever gonna do is bitch at you, you know?”
“What is it?”
“The damned Slear Line. We had to shut it down twice since the shift started this morning. It’s really bottlenecking things.”
“It’s older than I am.”
“That’s just it. The service guy keeps telling us we gotta replace it. I know that’s a load of dough, but I don’t think we have a choice.”
“I trust your judgment,” Nick said blandly.