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At 6:30 a.m., the ceiling lights turn themselves on. At 7:30, on cue from electronic signals speeding through an overhead conduit, the factory goes through its morning calisthenics. The machines begin moving and stretching, flexing conveyor belts, cams, steel-armed grippers, hissing pneumatic tubes, spot welders, laser beams, grinding stones, power drills and screwdrivers. Warning lights, strung like Japanese lanterns across the ceiling, start blinking. Soon the assembly line is running, producing the day's orders.
On the largest scale, the 45,000-sq.-ft. facility is Allen-Bradley's bid to stop chasing cheap labor in distant locales. Since 1977 the company has moved manufacturing to Texas, North Carolina and Mexico, resulting in the loss of 1,300 Milwaukee jobs. Now, with Department 260, Allen-Bradley is putting a factory where its skilled work force is.
To Company Chairman C.R. ("Bud") Whitney, automation is possibly the only way to prevent the U.S. from becoming entirely a paper-shuffling service economy. The soft-spoken Whitney believes that the most important wealth of nations comes from manufacturing. "You get it out of mother earth," he says. "You mine it, farm it or fish it. Then you take that basic raw material and add value to it. That's what we call manufacturing. If we don't create wealth, we are going to become a third-class country."
Other Milwaukee manufacturers have cut back in recent years, lowering the city's blue-collar employment from a peak of 223,600 in late 1979 to about 171,300 now. Schlitz, "the beer that made Milwaukee famous," is no longer brewed there. Allis-Chalmers no longer makes tractors in its suburban Milwaukee plant, where employment has plunged from 4,900 in 1979 to just 750 today. After losses in the early '80s, Harley-Davidson has staged something of a comeback in its battle against big Japanese motorcycles, helped by some automation, Japanese-style management techniques and tariff protection.
Though Allen-Bradley was sold to Rockwell International for $1.67 billion in 1985, that is no reason, feels Whitney, to do what some other companies have done and halt manufacturing in Milwaukee. In Department 260, Allen-Bradley makes two lines of its unsung, unglamorous electrical-control devices. They click through their critical duties unseen by the typical consumer, yet they help run the motors that raise elevators in skyscrapers, drive the machine tools that power Detroit's auto-assembly plants, twist the huge drills that coax coal from West Virginia and oil from East Texas, and start rides rolling -- and passengers squealing -- at Disney World.
Founded in 1903, the company started with an idea for a rheostat dreamed up by Lynde Bradley. Building on that idea, the company was well positioned as American heavy industry, led by autos, began its lusty journey through the 20th century. Owned solely by the founders and their descendants until the sale to Rockwell, Allen-Bradley had 1985 sales of about $1.15 billion, making it far larger in its particular field than such competitors as Square D, Gould and Westinghouse.