Empowered Workers Help Revive Factory After Hurricane Sandy
The day after Hurricane Sandy, Dal LaMagna drove to his factory in Building 12 at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. His company, IceStone, had been making hard surfaces, like countertops and tables, using recycled glass and cement. As he pulled into the yard, his first sight was of the factory’s new garage door, which cost $21,000, peeled back like the lid of a sardine tin. Inside were six destroyed forklifts. The entire place was drowned.
<snip>
“The workers said, ‘We can do this,’ ” Mr. LaMagna said. His number turned out to be way too high. “What I thought was going to cost $2 million to $3 million, we did with our own people for less than a million,” he said. “They said, ‘We can fix this.’ They are our partners in the business.”
This “partner” language turned out to be more than rhetorical flourish. IceStone, which was founded eight years ago, was still in the toddler stage in 2008 when the banking crisis and subsequent financial collapse nearly drove it out of business. Mr. LaMagna, 66, who made a tidy fortune with Tweezerman, a home beauty products company that he started and sold, was an investor in IceStone. He took over the operations in October 2011.
He announced that he was giving the employees 10 percent of the company’s stock, an amount he promised would increase to 20 percent when the investors had recouped their initial stakes. The purpose, Mr. LaMagna said, was to “empower the workers, let them get back from what they put in.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/01/nyregion/empowered-workers-help-revive-a-brooklyn-factory-hit-by-hurricane.html