Porta-Brace employees band together to avoid job cuts

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(Host) We’re examining this week how the recession has hit home in Vermont.

Today, we look at a company that’s feeling the economic squeeze but has decided not to lay off workers.

VPR’s Susan Keese takes us to the Porta-Brace headquarters in North Bennington, where the company’s teamwork ethic extends to sharing the pain of an ailing economy.

(Keese) Porta-Brace covers most of the second floor of an old industrial building in North Bennington. The company makes custom cases and protectors for the high tech gear used by film and video crews.

The tables where the bags are sewn are clustered in small groups to accommodate the company’s team approach. Sewer Deb Green says they produce more by working together.

(Deb) "We get an order of say, 20 cases. We decide amongst ourselves who’s going to do what part and we just share the sewup and assemble them together.”

(Volkmer) “We work good together…. Yup.”

(Keese) Starr Volkmer maneuvers a strip of silver mylar through her sewing machine. Today her team is making rain covers for TV cameras.

(Volkmer) "You see ‘em a lot of times in football games, wrapped around the camera, so the camera doesn’t get wet.”

(Keese) Volkmer and her teammates are used to spotting their bags at televised sports events and nature programs.

The workers got some unexpected  – and unpaid – TV-time earlier this winter  when the company shut down for a week due to declining orders.

Now that they’re back, they’re down from 40 hours a week to 32, for the time being. Volkmer is philosophical.

(Volkmer) "You learn to adjust. You have to. It’s bad all over, it’s not just here. So I feel lucky I have a job, really.”

(Keese) Just six months ago, Porta-Brace was growing so fast it couldn’t find enough skilled sewing machine operators.

The company was hailed as a Vermont success story this summer when it opened a plant in St. Johnsbury, where a garment factory had pulled up stakes, leaving 60 sewers out of work. Porta-Brace hired and retrained many of those workers with benefits and better pay.

Then came the economic melt down.

(Haythorn) "We moved from double digit growth … to double digit contraction in the span of about 60 days.”

(Keese) That’s Porta-Brace President Gregg Haythorn. He bought the company, in 2004. Haythorn liked the fact that the business was global, but small and geared to adapt quickly to changing technologies. And he liked the worker-centered ethic pioneered by the company’s founder.

Haythorn believes Porta-Brace will keep growing once things settle down. But he also knows his workers are key to his ability to meet those demands.

(Haythorn) "So we talked to all the team members about what are your priorities. And first and foremost it’s, ‘I need to know I have a job.’ And, then, `I need to know my family has access to medical insurances.’ So we tried to make a plan, a capacity plan, a scheduling plan that has as its objective zero layoffs.”

(Keese) The plan included an end, for now, to the company’s 401K-match, rollbacks for salaried workers. And the cuts in hours. Workers at the St. Johnsbury facility are down to 20 hours a week until things pick up.

(Haythorn) "And then we let everyone set their work group’s own schedule that would permit them to maximize their income in second jobs, part-time work that they might have, or minimize their expense as it relates to daycare, commuting cost if anybody’s driving a great distance.”

(Keese) Haythorn says people aren’t exactly thrilled with the situation. He can’t even promise them there won’t be layoffs down the road.

(Haythorn) "But generally folks appreciate and agree with the goal. Which is to come up with a plan that gives greatest confidence that we can avoid the kind of layoffs that are being addressed across the country and locally.”

(Keese) Haythorn says the company is also looking into other opportunities it didn’t have time to explore when things were booming — like making bags for the military or medical professions.  And for now, everybody’s on board.

For VPR News, I’m Susan Keese.

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