The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
The Low-Speed One Is Due in 2026
“High-Speed Train Due to Arrive Has Been Delayed 20 Years”–headline, Scotsman, Jan. 11
The Nanny State
“Huntsman Gets Coveted Goat Endorsement”–headline, Patch.com (Exeter, N.H.), Jan. 9
The Kind of Guy You’d Like to Fire
The other day Reuters reported on one of Mitt Romney’s private-equity investments:
It was funny at first.
The young men in business suits, gingerly picking their way among the millwrights, machinists and pipefitters at Kansas City’s Worldwide Grinding Systems steel mill. Gaping up at the cranes that swung 10-foot cast iron buckets through the air. Jumping at the thunder from the melt shop’s electric-arc furnace as it turned scrap metal into lava.
“They looked like a bunch of high school kids to me. A bunch of Wall Street preppies,” says Jim Linson, an electronics repairman who worked at the plant for 40 years. “They came in, they were in awe.”
Apparently they liked what they saw. Soon after, in October 1993, Bain Capital, co-founded by Mitt Romney, became majority shareholder in a steel mill that had been operating since 1888.
It didn’t work out. The steel company declared bankruptcy and shuttered the plant in 2001, leaving 750 workers out of jobs. Linson blames the failures on bad management:
As GS Industries sought to cut costs, it hired line managers with no experience in the steel industry, workers said. One had worked at Walmart; many others came straight out of the military.
“He would come up with some of the stupidest damn ideas that you ever seen,” the former steelworker Linson said of one supervisor, a retired Air Force colonel.
Paperwork proliferated. Cost-cutting efforts backfired. Managers skimped on purchases of everything from earplugs to spare motors and scaled back routine maintenance. Machines began to break down more often, and with parts no longer in stock a replacement could take days to arrive.
Labor costs spiked as managers revamped work schedules with little understanding of how the plant actually operated. Linson says he picked up an entire shift of overtime each week because his managers didn’t realize that a furnace needed a full eight hours to heat up to operating temperature.
“That didn’t work to their advantage,” he said. “I made a lot of money.”
Linson makes a compelling case against the company’s managers–but he also demonstrates that he was part of the problem. By profiting from his superiors’ ignorance rather than alerting them to the inefficiency, what was he doing other than looting the company?
For more “Best of the Web” click here and look for the “Best of the Web Today” link in the middle column below “Today’s Columnists.”
