Made in America
While U.S. manufacturing slowly recedes, a handful of companies buck the unrelenting tide. Photographer Dan Winters spends time on a few of the country’s last great factory floors.
by Scott Eden
Haas Automation What underpinned America’s manufacturing dominance? Machine tools, the devices that made possible mass production — auto, airspace, steel, plastics. Before World War II, the biggest, best tool companies were all American. Gradually, beginning in the ’70s, Japan usurped the U.S. as home to the world’s leading tool builders. | One exception: Haas Automation, of Oxnard, California, founded in 1983. Its success rests on Gene Haas, a machinist who invented a tool that positions parts precisely. Others came to envy the device so much that Haas began building them for production. | Twenty-four years later, his is the largest such firm in the U.S., with $850 million in projected 2007 sales. It employs 1,350 people, including Scott Scheffield (above), an operator of “machine-tending robots.” Most machines in Haas’s factory are made by Haas, including the tool changer (opposite page), which revolves like the chamber on a pistol. Despite its success, Haas is proof that U.S. manufacturing remains in decline: In 2007, it will sell more machines to foreign customers (53 percent) than to those in the U.S.
Applied Materials Think of Applied Materials — with $10 billion in revenue, the world’s largest maker of machines that fabricate microchips — as the Haas of the silicon set: Most of its devices (over 70 percent) now go overseas — though often to plants in Asia owned by U.S.-based concerns. | Its biggest plant is in Austin; it makes 80 percent of the company’s products and employs some 3,000 people. These laborers are atypical; most have advanced engineering degrees. The technology at the Austin plant, with workers sporting “bunny suits” in rooms denuded of even the tiniest dust specks, approaches science fiction. The machines pictured opposite — two half-built wafer-fabrication systems — will eventually be used to lay down microcircuits just one-500th the width of a human hair. | Such complexity is one reason the microchip-fabrication industry, despite its foreign-majority customer base, remains solidly American. “If you go offshore, you better be damn careful, because there’s so much valuable intellectual property,” says Steve Taylor, communications manager for Applied. “You don’t do it willy-nilly.”
Red Wing Shoe Company Since the company’s founding in 1905, generations of laborers — construction workers, miners, linemen, factory workers — have relied on Red Wings for protection and comfort. | At the main plant in Red Wing, Minnesota, the manufacturing process is traditional (almost nothing is glued, for instance) and vertically integrated. It begins with raw leather cured at the company’s own tannery, and 239 steps later, a pair of boxed boots is complete. Sue Borst (above) has worked at the plant since 1988. A sole stitcher, she’s standing in front of her machines holding a pair of stock No. 2221, designed for loggers and utility linemen. After Borst finishes, the boots move to the machine pictured opposite, which completes the sole-attaching process. | Today, it’s hard to find a pair of American-made footwear of any kind; 98 percent of all shoes worn in the U.S. are made overseas. Consequently, Red Wing must keep a “boneyard” of old machines in a warehouse, from which spare parts must be found. If a sewing machine breaks, for example, no company exists that can replace it. CL
