Fancy paper doilies

On a back street in Oneida, NY sits the shuttered Smith-Lee factory. The company was founded in 1898 by Charles A. Lee in nearby Canastota. Its original product was paper milk bottle caps. In 1899, Monroe C. Smith and Hurlburt W. Smith joined as partners and the name changed to Smith-Lee. Home delivery of milk in reusable glass bottles was growing fast in those days. Business boomed. Growth was so rapid that in 1900, the factory was relocated to Oneida, where a larger work force could be maintained.

The company prospered. In 1932 it stayed competitive by merging with a competitor, the Kleen Seal Corporation of Liverpool, NY, but retained the Smith-Lee name. After the end of World War II, with the introduction of the paper milk carton, the milkman and thus the milk bottle began to disappear. Smith-Lee knew it needed to diversify to survive. Its first new successful product was the disposable paper plate. Then in 1971 it acquired the Milwaukee Lace Paper Co., a leading manufacturer of paper lace doilies.

Over the next few years it became one of the preeminent providers of high end paper napkins, lace doilies, place mats and paper tablecloths for restaurants and country clubs across the nation. Finally in the spring of 2009 after 111 years of continuous operation it was acquired by a larger competitor, Hoffmaster Group of Oshkosh, Wis., and immediately closed. All 70 employees lost their jobs. Products bearing the Smith-Lee name are now manufactured by Hoffmaster. http://www.hoffmaster.com/AboutHoffmaster/History.aspx

I had quite a few Smith-Lee employees as clients during the 20 years I represented injured workers. Many of them had upper extremity injuries sustained in the process of making lace doilies, simply called “lace” by employees. Paper doilies are made using a punch press with a sharp die to cut stacks of paper into the desired patterns. Multiple large sheets of paper are positioned on the press, then BANG, they are cut into intricate designs. The machine operators then separate the resulting doilies by pulling the stack of paper to the edge of the machine surface and breaking them apart by pushing down all around the edges. The stack of separated doilies is then shaken to remove the small chad, then packed for shipping. Boxes of 1,000 doilies wholesale for between $50 to $150 depending on design. One operator can produce many thousands of fancy doilies per shift.

This process requires frequent and fairly violent use of the shoulders. After a few years of doing this job, operators tend to develop a problem called thoracic outlet syndrome. Thoracic outlet syndrome is a relatively rare condition caused by compression of a narrow space near the arm pit. Blood vessels and nerves coming from the spine pass through this small space below the collarbone and above the ribs. Frequent compression of this space from overuse of the shoulders pushing downward results in numbness and tingling of the hands, neck and arm pain, poor circulation in the arms and arm weakness.

The first client with thoracic outlet I had from Smith-Lee was a young woman in her 30s. She found a surgeon who promised her he could widen her thoracic outlet by removing part of her top rib. It didn't work. After several painful years during which she tried to recover, she retrained as a phlebotomist. Her arm and neck pain never went away. While I was still representing her, a second young woman from Smith-Lee came in with the same problem. She was also on “lace.” She didn't have the surgery and eventually got better with physical therapy. She also didn't go back to work at Smith-Lee. Next a middle aged man came in. He had worked at Smith-Lee for years making paper plates. When he hurt his back doing that, they put him in “lace” as his light duty job. He also developed thoracic outlet. He never worked again.

The pattern seemed compelling to me. I contacted the union steward at the plant and told him I felt that the “lace” job needed to be redesigned to be safer. He agreed but never got back to me. I called the adjuster at Smith-Lee's insurance company and told her the story. She agreed it seemed compelling. She got the company to agree to an inspection by an occupational safety expert. When the inspection showed “lace” to be causing the injuries, the insurance company required the factory to make changes as a condition of policy renewal. The factory changed insurance companies instead.

Now the factory is closed. Fancy paper doilies are made elsewhere, probably using the same process, causing the same inevitable, but avoidable injuries. It's something I think about every time I see one of those damn doilies. I can't help it. I know some of the victims.

Making Chocolate

I met a man this week who worked for years at the Nestlés chocolate factory in Fulton, NY. He started as a laborer in the “Liquor and Flavor” department right out of high school. Over the years he worked his way up to inspector in the same department. He was happy there and was good at his job. Then in 2003, Nestlés closed the plant.

In the world of chocolate, “liquor” is 100% cacao. It's the starting point for all chocolate products. To make liquor, the seed pod of the cocoa tree is harvested from plantations in the tropics. Each pod contains from 20 to 50 seeds. It takes about 400 seeds to make a pound of finished chocolate. After harvest, the fresh seeds are fermented for three to nine days to develop flavor, then the beans are dried for about a week. Dried beans are shipped to a factory where they are roasted for 30 minutes to two hours at high temperature, then the outer shells are cracked and removed. The kernel of pure chocolate that remains is called a “nib.” Some high end manufacturers further roast the nib to achieve a darker color and flavor. The nibs are then milled and pressed to liquify the cocoa butter and produce chocolate liquor (also called unsweetened). The remaining solid, “cocoa cake” is ground to make cocoa powders. Chocolate liquor is blended with sugar, butter, milk and other ingredients to produce the various types of chocolate: semi-sweet, bittersweet, milk chocolate, etc. Here is a good definition of each type: http://www.ghirardelli.com/chocopedia/varieties.aspx

At Nestlés in Fulton, chocolate liquor and many other ingredients arrived at the factory by rail and truck. The first part of the manufacturing process was “Liquor and Flavor” where the fellow I met worked. Here the raw materials were blended to make a paste. Chocolate refiners, a set of big rollers, crushed the paste into tiny flakes that determine the smoothness of the final product. The result is poured into giant vats (called a conch) to be heated and “conched.” Each batch of chocolate is constantly stirred for hours or even days. Conching reduces moisture, drives off any lingering acidic flavors, and coats each miniscule solid particle of chocolate with a layer of cocoa butter. Finally, the finished chocolate undergoes tempering, a heating and cooling process, that stabilizes the product. http://www.ghirardelli.com/chocopedia/making_manufacturing.aspx

As an inspector in liquor and flavor my informant used to test batches being conched for proper viscosity. He would scoop a sample out with a spatula and spread it on a glass plate. The number of thick lines that formed on the plate was used to determine moisture content. He would also test individual chocolate batches in a lab to be sure the percentages of the mixtures were right. He told me that the amount of flavoring was generally determined by weighing. For example, if vanilla needed to be added, large buckets of extract would be precisely weighted before being dumped into the mixture.

The Fulton plant is shuttered and empty now. Nestlés decided it was obsolete after over 100 years of production. The Swiss food giant opened its very first American factory here in 1899. When it closed, the last 467 employees had no other local place to work. All but one of the other factories in town, including a giant, nearly new, Miller Brewing plant, had already closed. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/02/nyregion/when-the-chocolate-melted-nestle-factory-closing-leaves-town-reeling.html?pagewanted=all My informant had to drive 35 miles to Syracuse every day to work making concrete blocks. He was back to working as an “unskilled” laborer at age 45.

Standing in front of the bank of abandoned loading docks last weekend vividly reminded me of another hot summer day back in the mid-1990s when Merry and I and friends toured the plant on what turned out to be the last open house factory tour. Even outside the giant plant the air was saturated with chocolate. Inside the oldest section of the plant every piece of woodwork had absorbed so much cocoa butter from the air that the wood was dark and oily. Signs warned the steps to the second level might be slippery.

Upstairs we marveled at the completely automated chocolate morsel machine. At one end a plate with a hundred or more tiny nozzles dipped to almost touch a wide moving conveyer. When the plate rose it left behind a hundred perfectly formed warm chocolate chips. The plate rose and fell about once every ten seconds. Thousands of small bits marched down the line passing through one giant refrigerator after another, each a few degrees cooler. The entire apparatus was at least a block long. At the far end the conveyer passed under a sharp edge freeing the morsels. Inertia carried them into a huge funnel. An endless river of cold chocolate chips poured through the floor around the clock to be bagged downstairs. Millions of chocolate chip cookies would be made with those morsels.

The entire place was spotless. The employees we encountered obviously took great pride in their work. This was the home of Toll House® chocolate chips. This was the birth place of the Crunch® candy bar way back in 1938. Now it's empty, another victim of mega-corporate efficiency. Before they decided to close it, here's what Nestlés had to say about the proud history of their Fulton operation.

http://www.sotherden.net/nestles/Nestles.htm

The little town of Fulton looks pretty ragged these days. Its largely working class population commutes or left town forever. This is the story of faceless capitalism all over America. I'm powerless to do anything about it. It makes me sad.