Sale of Company Eliminates Manufacturing Jobs in Boston
Posted on February 15, 2010
According to Boston.com, Ames Safety Envelope, a longstanding company in Massachusetts, has been sold, thereby eliminating 150 manufacturing jobs in Boston (click here).
The new owner of Ames Safety Envelope is TAB, a Wisconsin-based records management company with offshoots in Europe, Canada, and Australia.
TAB president Bill Graham confirmed the sale in an e-mail. Over the next six to nine months, all manufacturing will move to Wisconsin, cutting about 150 Somerville jobs; customer service and sales will remain in the Boston area.
Boston.com said Ames was founded in 1919 and moved to Somerville in the 1930s. CEO Bill Shea said in a statement on the Somerville Chamber of Commerce website, “Computer-driven digital solutions have increasingly replaced the company’s principal markets of X-ray and medical filing products. In addition, the Northeast has become an expensive area to operate a manufacturing operation. Unfortunately, a number of the company’s endeavors to supplement the product downturn have been unsuccessful.”
“It’s sad. Ames was a family-owned and -operating business in the city,” said Chamber president/CEO Stephen Mackey. The group named its lifetime achievement award after Ames founder John W. Fitzgerald, who was also the first chairman of the chamber’s board.
At one time, Ames was the city’s biggest business employer, Mackey said, with 500 workers and several buildings off Somerville Avenue. (The top three employers were the city, Tufts, and Cambridge Health Alliance.) With downsizing in recent years, the company leased some of its factory space to small companies such as First Act Guitar.
Immigrant health advocates praised Ames’s care for worker safety. This is a big deal, considering the backlash against immigrant safety in the workplace.
In 2004, two Vietnamese floor finishers in Somerville were killed when varnish fumes ignited, sending a fireball down a stairwell.
Tufts University, Cambridge Health Alliance, and five Somerville community groups have come together to raise awareness of occupational health risks and to teach people their rights.
Statewide, immigrants are disproportionately more likely to be injured on the job, said Tufts professor David Gute. In 2005, immigrants made up 17 percent of the workforce and accounted for 28 percent of on-the-job deaths, said Gute, citing a study from the Massachusetts Coalition for Occupational Health and Safety, and the AFL-CIO. Gute is leading a survey with more than 300 responses so far, trying to piece out data for Somerville.
Boston.com asks, is Somerville manufacturing approaching its last gasp? A number of recent city plans, including Union Square rezoning and preliminary discussion of the Inner Belt, aim to shift out industry for businesses that pay more in taxes. Mackey said that the cost of living and energy prices herald heavy industry’s continued decline across the Commonwealth.
“The key in the transition is to keep your tax base producing,” he said. “So you don’t want to toss out anything prematurely.”