by Paul Bass | Dec 4, 2015 3:24 pm

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Posted to: Business/ Economic Development, Hometown Heroes, Labor, Long Wharf

Ray Pompano plans to report to Sargent Drive Tuesday morning to work on machine parts, as he has for over 50 years. But first he has an important 6 a.m. stop to make at Sports Haven.

Pompano isn’t headed there to place a bet on a horse.

Rather, he plans to conduct his final meeting as president of Local 243 of the United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America (UE), which represents workers at the Assa Abloy/Sargent hardware plant. Pompano has held that job for 31 years — longer than any local president in the national union’s history.

At the meeting, Pompano plans to swear in Wayne Morrison as his successor.

Then he plans to punch in at the plant where he has worked hard since 1965 (minus a two-year Army stint). He’ll walk an expanse of modern computerized machines, past a cage with arm-swinging robots, to his station in an ever-shrinking corner in the rear of the shop floor, where he does what he has always loved — work with his hands, as a tool-and-die maker refining precision parts for soon-to-be-obsolete machines.

Machines like the one with which he shares his days.

“This is my baby. This is a ‘Bridgeport,’” he said one late afternoon this week, showing off his milling machine after the main shift had departed and the nearby robots gestured amid an eerie calm. “There are only three of us left back here.”

Approaching the end of his presidency and, next year, his retirement from the shop floor, Pompano reflected on a half century living the American dream. He spoke about playing a role that has grown increasingly scarce in 21st-century New Haven: well-paid factory worker with the pay and benefits needed to support a middle-class family, turning out a useful product sold around the world, represented by a respected union and a good company. While the world has changed, that way of life can still have a future, Pompano argued. Especially when a union knows the right time to take a stand, and the right time to work together with management to stay afloat.

“I am so proud of Sargent’s. Look at the many companies that have failed,” he said. “As long as we have a two-way street, we will have a long future.”

Polisher Pompano

“If you want to know the history,” Pompano said, “here is the true story.”

His tool-and-die shift over at 3:30, Pompano settled into his cramped union office off Sargent’s cafeteria to tell that story. He wore black jeans, black steel-toed shoes, and, special for this occasion — the history-telling — a blue-and-white short-sleeved work shirt with a UE button.

He pinned a Martin Luther King button beside it, proud, he said, that his local’s advocacy made Sargent hardware the region’s first private employer to make the civil rights leader’s birthday a paid holiday, in 1989.

Clippings on the walls and old photocopies spilling out of cabinet drawers told pieces of the history of one of New Haven’s oldest and most successful manufacturers, and a workforce that at its early 20th-century peak employed 1,800 people to turn out keys, locks, tools, and scales for people around the world.

Pompano’s entrance into that world came in the summer of 1965.

He had just completed his studies at Wilbur Cross High School. His family lived on Florence Avenue in Morris Cove.

“I thought I was going to take the summer off,” Pompano recalled. “Who was better than me? I I just graduated. I was going to spend my summer at Lighthouse.

“My father had other plans.”

Those plans involved getting a job. Pompano had marketable skills: In high school, his father had gotten him part-time work as a polisher and buffer at Reliance Manufacturing, a sweatshop near their previous home in Fair Haven. Pompano liked working with his hands. (“You weren’t supposed to be on a wheel until you were 18. We used to cheat.”)

“It was a wonderful time. Here’s why: I went to Winchester’s. I went to H.B. Ives,” he recalled, ticking off now-departed factories that hummed in some cases around the clock in New Haven’s heyday as a manufacturing city. “I went to Pratt & Whitney. And I went to Sargent’s.”

He got three calls back with job offers. Sargent’s seemed the most appealing because of its modern new plant; in 1964, exactly 100 years after the Sargent brothers moved to Water Street what would become a leading international hardware factory, the company had moved operations to Sargent Drive, a developing industrial area alongside the under-construction I-95 interstate highway. Pompano heard the place had air conditioning.

Which was true.

“I made the right choice,” he said. “H.B. Ives is gone. Winchester is gone. Pratt & Whitney moved out. Here I am, over 50 years later, at Sargent’s.”

He started out polishing doorknobs in the finishing room for $1.66 an hour, $66 a week. He paid his parents $20 a month in rent. That left him enough money to save up for his dream: a new car.

As 1966 dawned, he had enough to visit the car lots on what was then New Haven’s Automobile Row, Whalley Avenue. His mom came to co-sign on a Chevy. He needed to return in a few days with the money.

A letter arrived in the mail, and scuttled the car plan.

Private Pompano

Pompano paraphrased the letter from memory: “Greetings. This is your Uncle Sam. You are asked to report to basic training at Fort Dix.”

The Johnson Administration was ramping up the draft for the escalating war in Vietnam. Pompano and ten of his Wilbur Cross classmates were among 90,000 called up that month across the United States.

Pompano proceeded from basic to advanced training as an army intelligence specialist.

“I had a smile on my my face until I asked the company sergeant what it meant. he said, ‘You’re a recon scout. Your life span in Vietnam is a minute and a half.” The job would entail scoping out battlefields in advance of platoons.

Or so he thought. Until his orders got lost in a paperwork shuffle. He ended up spending two years stateside. Then he returned to New Haven, newly married.

And he returned to the Sargent buffing and polishing room.

One day he saw a co-worker, Ray Taupier, drive home in a shiny new Oldsmobile Toronado.

“What job does he do?” Pompano asked someone.

“He’s a tool-and-die maker.”

Not long after, a supervisor tapped Pompano on the shoulder one day as he worked at his polishing wheel. “You still interested in being a tool-and-die maker?” the supervisor asked. Yes he was.

The next day, Sargent’s personnel director, John Dwyer, asked again — then pointed out that Pompano would need to spend four years as an apprentice. Apprentices earned $2.20 an hour. Pompano had been earning $3.20 an hour.

Dwyer knew that Pompano’s wife Angela had recently given birth to their first daughter, Renee. He made Pompano promise to find a way to make up the $40 weekly wage loss. Thinking of Ray Taupier’s Toronado, Pompano agreed, then landed a partial evening shift back at his old Fair Haven haunt, Reliance.

“Mr. Dwyer,” Pompano recalled, “changed my life.”

Promotee Pompano

So did older journeymen in the tool-and-die department, who noticed how Pompano one day spoke up for a coworker who received unfair treatment from a supervisor. The supervisor chewed out the coworker for leaving his jacket on his chair instead of hanging it in the locker. Pompano pointed out that all the younger workers had their jackets on their chairs. “If you pick on him, you’ve got to pick on everyone else in the room,” he told the supervisor, who proceeded to order everyone to move their jackets.

The journeymen asked Pompano to run for shop steward in UE Local 243, which had been representing Sargent workers since 1939. Pompano ran, and won.

One day he raised his hand during a union meeting, which longtime Local President Madeline Scillia was conducting.

“I was sitting in the back. I was scared” to speak. But he felt the other members were focused too singularly on raising wages in contract talks.

Scillia called on Pompano.

“We have to improve medical benefits,” he said.

“Why?” Scillia asked.

Pompano told the story of how, before his wife gave birth to Renee, he had to tell her she couldn’t continue seeing “Dr. Day,” a favored OB/GYN. Dr. Day charged $25 a visit. Sargent capped reimbursements for prenatal doctor visits at $75. She needed well more than three visits. The personnel department told him to send Angela to the charity clinic at Grace-New Haven Hospital, which he did. Angela was upset.

Scillia decided she’d spotted a rising union star. The union sent Pompano to South Central Community College (forerunner to Gateway) to study labor law and public speaking. In 1975, he was elected the local’s vice-president.

Bossman Pompano

“There’s another part of the story,” Pompano said. A detour.

“Management came to me one day and asked me to oversee the finishing department” as a foreman. “There were 90 people in finishing. It was chaos.”

Pompano was torn. He asked Scillia for advice.

“Ray, I want you to take the position,” she told him.

But what about the union?

“People like us,” Scillia told him, “never ever get an opportunity like this one.”

So Pompano took the job. He got along with the workers, he said. He got along with the bosses. But he wasn’t happy.

The workers went out on strike one day. He felt they were right. He called in sick for three days. Then he had to come to work or lose his job. His coworkers, he said, understood. Bosses were allowed to cross the line, in their estimation.

He also generally disliked how management operated at that time, he said. The Sargent family had sold the company in 1967 to one of a succession of out-of-state corporate owners. Pompano didn’t agree with the latest owner’s approach.

Just as importantly, he missed working with his hands.

He lasted eight years and seven months as a boss. Then he returned to the tool-and-die section, working the machine. Where he felt he belonged.

President Pompano

That was 1984. Madeline Scillia had retired as local union president after 22 years. Her successor was in hot water with the rank and file for negotiating a contract with no pay raise. Pompano’s coworkers “begged” him to challenge the president in an election.

Pompano agreed. The incumbent withdrew from the campaign. Pompano won the presidency unopposed.

And has held it ever since.

No other UE local president has served 31 years, or even close, anywhere else in the country, according to Alan Hart, the institutional memory in the union’s Pittsburgh office. “I’ve never heard of anyone [else] going 25 years,” said Hart, who edits news for UE publications. “He’s a very good leader. He’s very inclusive. He pays a lot of attention to the needs of his members.” Plus, Hart said, unlike so many local leaders who eventually burn out, “he’s been willing to stick with it.”

New Haven Central Labor Council President Bob Proto said Pompano will “go down in history” as a “fearless” union president who was totally focused on what was right for the workers. “He was a great negotiator, and always led with his heart.”

Pompano faced tough negotiations. New Haven’s factories started closing long before he assumed the presidency. The exodus of manufacturing jobs continued as New Haven pivoted to a service economy dominated by Yale and Yale-New Haven Hospital. By century’s end, those two institutions would employ more workers than the next eight largest employers combined. Surviving manufacturers shrank, not just because of competition, but because of newer high-tech, labor-saving machines.

Sargent hung on. Its latest owner, Sweden-based Assa Abloy, the world’s largest lock manufacturer, bought the company in 1996. The 375,000 square-foot Sargent Drive plant serves as the company’s North American headquarters; Jack Dwyer’s son, also named Jack, served as human resources chief. The unionized workforce is down to 264. Local 243 had succeeded in getting not just wages raised, but pensions and those medical benefits Pompano targeted. Workers receive 100 percent medical coverage, with no deductibles, meaning parents could go to their favored doctors and not have to take charity care from the hospital. They make an average of $20 an hour.

Pompano said the union has been able to negotiate those gains without needing to strike, partly because both labor and management don’t view each other as enemies. He praised Assa Abloy for investing in the New Haven plant.

“It has to be a two-way street,” Pompano said. “If it’s only good for the union, the union won’t survive. If it’s only good for the company, the company won’t survive.”

“Sargent is not our enemy. Our competition is our enemy,” he added. “I am a realistic president with a realistic union. I don’t condone bad behavior. The stereotype that union people are lazy is nonsense; 99 percent of union workers are good, dedicated workers. No one is ever perfect in every way, all right? The stereotype that unions only protect the bad workers in not true, all right?” The union fights for mistreated workers, and tells those who slough off to shape up, Pompano said.

Eventually, as competition increased from places like Mexico, where workers earned “two dollars an hour,” Local 243 agreed to some concessions. Newer employees pay 20 percent of their health premiums; they have 401k, not defined pension, plans.

Then again, there aren’t many new workers anyway. The new rules affect 38 workers, the total number hired since 2004. Thirty-five workers took an early-retirement buyout this past July.

The union’s contract expires in March. The challenge in upcoming negotiations on a new contract will be to hold onto those enviable benefits.

Post-Sargent Pompano

Pompano, who is 69 years old, said he intends to help preserve those benefits. He has agreed to stay on as an adviser to the union through March to help negotiate that contract.

“If there’s no contract,” he said, “I’m not leaving my members. The fire still burns in my belly. We’re an old-fashioned rank-and-file ass-kicking union.”

Pompano also serves as UE’s Northeast regional president, overseeing 72 locals. He plans to continue in that role at least through the end of his term this May; at that point, he’ll assess whether to run for reelection.

During the Sargent contract negotiations, he also plans to remain full-time in the tool-and-die section, which is down from 23 to three workers molding gauges and fixtures and jigs for machines turning out parts for increasingly outmoded vestigial machines. When the new contract is reached, Pompano said, he will finally retire from the shop floor as well and walk away from his milling-machine pal Bridgeport.

He’ll drive home for work for the last time — in his Ford Escape. He never bought a Toronado. But he did buy a new 2000 Mercury Sable, and then the Escape.

“It’s quite comfortable,” Pompano said.