The names and dates change, but the theme has held constant: Rhode Island manufacturers downsizing or shutting down, moving their operations elsewhere, or just going bankrupt.
The latest addition to the list is Paramount Cards, in Pawtucket – the 100-year-old company is moving its production facilities to Canada, leaving 250 people jobless. In January, Swarovski cut 178 jobs at its Cranston facility. Electric Boat has plans for layoffs at Quonset Point.
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Rewind to 1995, and you’ll find Hasbro laying off 400 people as it expanded its operations in Texas and Mexico. Die maker Hoechst Celanese also laid off about 400 people that year.
As of March 1995, state figures show, Rhode Island had 25 manufacturers with 500 or more workers, and collectively they employed nearly 22,000 people. A decade later, only eight such large manufacturers remained, with fewer than 8,600 employees.
Nearly two in five Rhode Island manufacturing jobs were lost between 1992 and last year, leaving only about 55,500 as of last June, the R.I. Department of Labor & Training says. Cities such as Providence, Central Falls and Woonsocket have been hardest hit.
John Grady, executive director of the Rhode Island Manufacturers Association, said in the 1990s U.S. companies experienced the “Asian crisis.”
As Asian countries started producing goods of competitive quality at lower costs, Grady said, many U.S. manufacturers lost their competitive edge, so they had to either shut down, or move their operations overseas.
Al Lubrano, president of Technical Materials Inc., in Lincoln, and chairman of the manufacturers’ association, said the “changes in the global manufacturing landscape” have been the biggest driver of local manufacturers’ departures.
Companies blame the state’s high taxes and production costs, Lubrano said. High energy costs, spiraling health care costs, high labor costs and stricter environmental and worker safety regulations are all factors as well, he said.
But Jean Robertson, senior director of policy and research at the R.I. Economic Development Corporation, said that although factories have closed and jobs have been lost, manufacturing continues to be extremely valuable to the state.
“What’s happening with manufacturing is it’s being oversimplified and misunderstood,” Robertson said. Though the number of manufacturing jobs has been dropping, Robertson noted, the value of the goods produced has held steady. Rhode Island produced $11 billion worth of goods in 2004, about $1 billion more than in 1994, she said – meaning manufacturers produced roughly as much value with fewer workers.
Yet those figures also reflect a change in the nature of Rhode Island manufacturing. The survivors – and new arrivals and startups – tend to be focused on higher-value goods and innovative twists on their old product lines.
Concordia Manufacturing, in Coventry, started in 1920 as a maker of silk yarns. In the late 1980s, however, the company began expanding its capabilities into engineered products for aerospace, filtration media and other applications. Now it’s producing textiles for the medical and bioscience community.
Lubrano said Technical Materials also has had to adapt.
“We focus on technology that is not easily duplicated and [that is] unique to solving our customers requirements,” he said. “The things we do today are very different from the things we were doing five or six years ago.”
Grady said the surviving companies are using “lean” manufacturing, and “they are streamlining processes so there are not as many steps.” They’re also automating, and while that improves their productivity, it has also led to even more job cuts.
“It’s transformed from low-tech, labor-intensive manufacturing … to a very high-tech, less labor-intensive, more brain-intensive manufacturing,” Robertson said.
In addition, the types of manufacturing dominant in Rhode Island have changed. The value of chemical manufacturing nearly doubled in the last 10 years, Robertson said. Plastics and rubber manufacturing also increased, while textile, printing and jewelry manufacturing dropped sharply.
With pharmaceutical giant Amgen moving to West Greenwich in 2002, the human therapeutics company generated about 1,200 new jobs, Robertson said. More recently, there have been two smaller, but high-profile additions to Rhode Island’s historically prominent jewelry manufacturing sector: Tiffany & Co. and Henry Birks & Sons, both of which have set up shop in the Highland Corporate Park in Woonsocket.
But looking ahead, Lubrano said he expects to see local manufacturers continue to struggle.
“We will be OK because we are so technologically driven,” Lubrano said of his business. “But there are many companies that won’t [be].”
