https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/05/01/magazine/remington-guns-jobs-huntsville.htmlThe news spread around Huntsville, Ala., in the winter of 2014. Remington, the country’s oldest gun maker, had decided to expand from its historic home in upstate New York to a gigantic former Chrysler factory near the airport. Workers at the new plant, the company said, would earn a minimum average of $19.50 an hour assembling shotguns, pistols, hunting rifles and AR-15-style semiautomatics. The city’s mayor wrote in a newspaper column that he was thrilled that Remington’s quest for a new factory space had ended in Huntsville. He calculated the typical annual salary as $42,500.
more
Secretive private equity firm bought Remington. That is how.
From the moment Remington was bought, the die was cast, this was intentional. Sorry boys, I think they were doing that 3D Chess thing...
They sure produced some crap firearms
Shouldn't this be in the Remington Collectors sub forum?
hahahahahahahahahahahaha
Typical, not a single mention of Clinton suits against gun manufactures or democrats allowing Remington to be sued for advertising now.
Lets not bring that up.
Having had & still having, intimate relationships with private equity businesses, there is little that is surprising in that article.
Remington will soon die the death of a 1,000 cuts.
MM
Sad that they felt the need to drop in “Republican connections” in the story. It’s not a political issue. This was the “nature of the beast” when it comes to “private equity” groups. They buy companies, run up the debt, pay big salaries/bonuses to the folks at the top, and strip the bones clean.
The amazing thing is that Cerberus was able to get the profits out of Remington, pay off the purchase price, then essentially saddle Remington with the initial debt Cerberus should have incurred for buying Remington. What a shell game. Employees weren’t paid well, Huntsville laid out a ton of money they didn’t get back, taxpayers got screwed, but Cerberus IMMEDIATELY got their purchase price back and had nothing to lose. This is what happens when you’re allowed to play with “other people’s money” and don’t have to play with your own...
but Cerberus IMMEDIATELY got their purchase price back and had nothing to lose.
AND, they took out a schitt-load of cash, besides.
MM
"I'd like to spit some Beechnut in that dudes eye and shoot him with my old .45"
Fascinating story, another to look at is vista outdoors
Secretive private equity firm bought Remington. That is how.
Nail meet hammer.
It was bought with the intention of closing it with the idea of extracting as much money as they could.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/05/01/magazine/remington-guns-jobs-huntsville.htmlThe news spread around Huntsville, Ala., in the winter of 2014. Remington, the country’s oldest gun maker, had decided to expand from its historic home in upstate New York to a gigantic former Chrysler factory near the airport. Workers at the new plant, the company said, would earn a minimum average of $19.50 an hour assembling shotguns, pistols, hunting rifles and AR-15-style semiautomatics. The city’s mayor wrote in a newspaper column that he was thrilled that Remington’s quest for a new factory space had ended in Huntsville. He calculated the typical annual salary as $42,500.
more WTF is your point?
Employees making 19 dollars an hour is what killed Remington?
The typical financial genius here usually blames a Union,
Bonus points awarded for being new and innovative,
Employees getting paid, the nerve.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/05/01/magazine/remington-guns-jobs-huntsville.htmlThe news spread around Huntsville, Ala., in the winter of 2014. Remington, the country’s oldest gun maker, had decided to expand from its historic home in upstate New York to a gigantic former Chrysler factory near the airport. Workers at the new plant, the company said, would earn a minimum average of $19.50 an hour assembling shotguns, pistols, hunting rifles and AR-15-style semiautomatics. The city’s mayor wrote in a newspaper column that he was thrilled that Remington’s quest for a new factory space had ended in Huntsville. He calculated the typical annual salary as $42,500.
more WTF is your point?
Employees making 19 dollars an hour is what killed Remington?
The typical financial genius here usually blames a Union,
Bonus points awarded for being new and innovative,
Employees getting paid, the nerve.
The point is he is a communist, communists have no economic reality. Lets not blame low grade union workmanship in NY , Trigger Lawsuit which was not handled correctly for any issues. I don't think their deal with Walmart did them any favors either. I want someone to name any company that has ever been bought by a private equity firm that survived and actually grew. They are the financial vampries of this world.
Secretive private equity firm bought Remington. That is how.
We know what they do. Who TF is dumb enough to loan them money?
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/05/01/magazine/remington-guns-jobs-huntsville.htmlThe news spread around Huntsville, Ala., in the winter of 2014. Remington, the country’s oldest gun maker, had decided to expand from its historic home in upstate New York to a gigantic former Chrysler factory near the airport. Workers at the new plant, the company said, would earn a minimum average of $19.50 an hour assembling shotguns, pistols, hunting rifles and AR-15-style semiautomatics. The city’s mayor wrote in a newspaper column that he was thrilled that Remington’s quest for a new factory space had ended in Huntsville. He calculated the typical annual salary as $42,500.
more WTF is your point?
Employees making 19 dollars an hour is what killed Remington?
The typical financial genius here usually blames a Union,
Bonus points awarded for being new and innovative,
Employees getting paid, the nerve.
you didn't read the article did you?...….and if you did read it , you didn't understand it......bob
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/05/01/magazine/remington-guns-jobs-huntsville.htmlThe news spread around Huntsville, Ala., in the winter of 2014. Remington, the country’s oldest gun maker, had decided to expand from its historic home in upstate New York to a gigantic former Chrysler factory near the airport. Workers at the new plant, the company said, would earn a minimum average of $19.50 an hour assembling shotguns, pistols, hunting rifles and AR-15-style semiautomatics. The city’s mayor wrote in a newspaper column that he was thrilled that Remington’s quest for a new factory space had ended in Huntsville. He calculated the typical annual salary as $42,500.
more WTF is your point?
Employees making 19 dollars an hour is what killed Remington?
The typical financial genius here usually blames a Union,
Bonus points awarded for being new and innovative,
Employees getting paid, the nerve.
Except workers weren't being paid $19/hr. Read the article.
I like my 870, but that’s the only Remington I own.
I wonder what would've happened to Remington if in the mid-2000's instead of importing Zastava Mauser/mini-mausers and Russian shotguns, they would have upped production out of the custom shop and built 40X precision rifles stocked, barreled, and chambered for F-Class and Precision Rifle with a street price under $3K?
So now what happens? Can the Remington name and patents and tooling be purchased and the company resurrected, as Ithaca was?
I like my 870, but that’s the only Remington I own.
I only have a 40+ year old 760, but if I were in the market for a new semiauto shotgun, I'd look hard at the V3.
Lets not forget the several failed shotgun and pistols they brought to market...and of course a total and utter lack of basic QC.
Of the $1 billion in debt almost half was borrowed to pay dividends to shareholders. Hard to stay in business during slow times when your pulling all the cash out during good times
Remington can stay in business making 700s, 870s, 1100s, V3s, and Versamax shotguns. They do need to pick up the pace with QC though...particularly on their rifles.
Remington can stay in business making 700s, 870s, 1100s, V3s, and Versamax shotguns. They do need to pick up the pace with QC though...particularly on their rifles.
Their two NFA-cheating shotguns (non-shotguns) are wildly popular.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/05/01/magazine/remington-guns-jobs-huntsville.htmlThe news spread around Huntsville, Ala., in the winter of 2014. Remington, the country’s oldest gun maker, had decided to expand from its historic home in upstate New York to a gigantic former Chrysler factory near the airport. Workers at the new plant, the company said, would earn a minimum average of $19.50 an hour assembling shotguns, pistols, hunting rifles and AR-15-style semiautomatics. The city’s mayor wrote in a newspaper column that he was thrilled that Remington’s quest for a new factory space had ended in Huntsville. He calculated the typical annual salary as $42,500.
more WTF is your point?
Employees making 19 dollars an hour is what killed Remington?
The typical financial genius here usually blames a Union,
Bonus points awarded for being new and innovative,
Employees getting paid, the nerve.
Except workers weren't being paid $19/hr. Read the article.
...Though the company was supposed to be hiring hundreds of people, workers said that the line appeared suspiciously sparse. In addition, though the jobs had been advertised at $19.50 an hour in newspaper columns and Facebook posts — as they should have been, per the development agreement — no one seemed to be earning anything close to $19.50. Johnson, along with the president of the Huntsville N.A.A.C.P. chapter at the time, the Rev. Robert Shanklin, invited a union organizer from the United Mine Workers of America, the same union that organized Remington’s Ilion plant, to use its church facilities and offices as necessary in order to hold clandestine meetings.
The organizer arrived in Huntsville in 2016. He was born in Birmingham and spent most of his career organizing throughout the South. As a result, he tended to be suspicious of Southern bosses — “I have a warped mind when it comes to Alabama,” he told me — and he expected an oppositional management at Remington. But another obstacle surprised him. From week to week, in Johnson’s church or Shanklin’s N.A.A.C.P. office, the organizer rarely saw the same face twice. It seemed to Shanklin that in order to prevent unionization, the factory was exchanging its full-time workers for temps, who came and went rapidly, never sticking around long enough to have a stake. (Remington declined to comment for this article.)
Though the company was supposed to be hiring hundreds of people, workers said that the line appeared suspiciously sparse
The presence of the temp workers, who were exempt from the minimum average hourly wage in the development agreement, also served as a cautionary tale, a reminder of how much lower you could sink if you raised trouble. Temps started at $9.20 an hour with no benefits. Full-time workers, for their part, were often unaware that the tax-incentive package might entitle them to higher wages than they were receiving. And when they did realize, they were unsure what to do.
While I was in Huntsville, Remington employees told me that if they spoke to me for this article, they would be fired. One woman, a line worker, told me over the phone: “These people, they have ways of finding out if you talked. I talk to you, no ifs, ands or buts, I’m gone. It makes us feel they have something to hide. But we keep our mouths shut. Clock in, clock out.”
I eventually met a former employee, who asked to be identified by her first initial, D., and agreed to talk about her experience at Remington. D. started working full time on the Remington line in August 2015. She was 43 and divorced and moved to Alabama more than a decade earlier from Michigan, along with her 17-year-old son. In 2014 she was earning $10 an hour as a housekeeper at a hospital, but she left for a job at Remington after seeing a newspaper article in which the company promised a minimum average hourly wage of $19.50.
After taking her two-week course at A.I.D.T., D. started work. She was assigned to a boxing station, which was not on an assembly line but at a static counter where the workers stood side by side. The job was boring. She received the guns — they were long guns, for hunting — placed them in boxes, then weighed the boxes on a digital scale. If the scale displayed a red light, that meant D. had missed a part. When she opened her first paycheck, she saw that she was earning $12.36 an hour — gross. After taxes and benefits, her take-home pay amounted to $353.70 a week.
After two years, according to paystubs that D. shared with me, she was earning $14.16 an hour. ...
What’s next? Bankrupt the company. Wash hands of creditors. Cost cut return the company to profit. Peddle the company off to another private equity company. Boom it’s a cycle, look at bushnell and vista outdoors. I personally have seen a big uptick in quality from Remington very recently
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/05/01/magazine/remington-guns-jobs-huntsville.htmlThe news spread around Huntsville, Ala., in the winter of 2014. Remington, the country’s oldest gun maker, had decided to expand from its historic home in upstate New York to a gigantic former Chrysler factory near the airport. Workers at the new plant, the company said, would earn a minimum average of $19.50 an hour assembling shotguns, pistols, hunting rifles and AR-15-style semiautomatics. The city’s mayor wrote in a newspaper column that he was thrilled that Remington’s quest for a new factory space had ended in Huntsville. He calculated the typical annual salary as $42,500.
more WTF is your point?
Employees making 19 dollars an hour is what killed Remington?
The typical financial genius here usually blames a Union,
Bonus points awarded for being new and innovative,
Employees getting paid, the nerve.
The point is he is a communist, communists have no economic reality. Lets not blame low grade union workmanship in NY , Trigger Lawsuit which was not handled correctly for any issues. I don't think their deal with Walmart did them any favors either. I want someone to name any company that has ever been bought by a private equity firm that survived and actually grew. They are the financial vampries of this world.
What deal with Walmart? You mean the one where they made all those 700s and 870s to Walmart standards.. 😆
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/05/01/magazine/remington-guns-jobs-huntsville.htmlThe news spread around Huntsville, Ala., in the winter of 2014. Remington, the country’s oldest gun maker, had decided to expand from its historic home in upstate New York to a gigantic former Chrysler factory near the airport. Workers at the new plant, the company said, would earn a minimum average of $19.50 an hour assembling shotguns, pistols, hunting rifles and AR-15-style semiautomatics. The city’s mayor wrote in a newspaper column that he was thrilled that Remington’s quest for a new factory space had ended in Huntsville. He calculated the typical annual salary as $42,500.
more WTF is your point?
Employees making 19 dollars an hour is what killed Remington?
The typical financial genius here usually blames a Union,
Bonus points awarded for being new and innovative,
Employees getting paid, the nerve.
You didn’t read the article...
Hedge fund operators running a gun manufacture is what bankrupted Remington, just like they bankrupt everything else they get their hands on. It is their business model.
Here are the folks who made money on Remington...
Cerberus Leadership Team...
I’ll just add that the OP linked article was a great read.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/05/01/magazine/remington-guns-jobs-huntsville.htmlThe news spread around Huntsville, Ala., in the winter of 2014. Remington, the country’s oldest gun maker, had decided to expand from its historic home in upstate New York to a gigantic former Chrysler factory near the airport. Workers at the new plant, the company said, would earn a minimum average of $19.50 an hour assembling shotguns, pistols, hunting rifles and AR-15-style semiautomatics. The city’s mayor wrote in a newspaper column that he was thrilled that Remington’s quest for a new factory space had ended in Huntsville. He calculated the typical annual salary as $42,500.
more This is what I read,
the part that the OP wanted to showcase and pontificate on,
Nothing more than stroking some false ego.
Wages did not kill Remington, which is the subject title.
I have an 870, the only Remington worth having( in a lot of year)s, IMO
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/05/01/magazine/remington-guns-jobs-huntsville.htmlThe news spread around Huntsville, Ala., in the winter of 2014. Remington, the country’s oldest gun maker, had decided to expand from its historic home in upstate New York to a gigantic former Chrysler factory near the airport. Workers at the new plant, the company said, would earn a minimum average of $19.50 an hour assembling shotguns, pistols, hunting rifles and AR-15-style semiautomatics. The city’s mayor wrote in a newspaper column that he was thrilled that Remington’s quest for a new factory space had ended in Huntsville. He calculated the typical annual salary as $42,500.
more WTF is your point?
Employees making 19 dollars an hour is what killed Remington?
The typical financial genius here usually blames a Union,
Bonus points awarded for being new and innovative,
Employees getting paid, the nerve.
Except workers weren't being paid $19/hr. Read the article.
...Though the company was supposed to be hiring hundreds of people, workers said that the line appeared suspiciously sparse. In addition, though the jobs had been advertised at $19.50 an hour in newspaper columns and Facebook posts — as they should have been, per the development agreement — no one seemed to be earning anything close to $19.50. Johnson, along with the president of the Huntsville N.A.A.C.P. chapter at the time, the Rev. Robert Shanklin, invited a union organizer from the United Mine Workers of America, the same union that organized Remington’s Ilion plant, to use its church facilities and offices as necessary in order to hold clandestine meetings.
The organizer arrived in Huntsville in 2016. He was born in Birmingham and spent most of his career organizing throughout the South. As a result, he tended to be suspicious of Southern bosses — “I have a warped mind when it comes to Alabama,” he told me — and he expected an oppositional management at Remington. But another obstacle surprised him. From week to week, in Johnson’s church or Shanklin’s N.A.A.C.P. office, the organizer rarely saw the same face twice. It seemed to Shanklin that in order to prevent unionization, the factory was exchanging its full-time workers for temps, who came and went rapidly, never sticking around long enough to have a stake. (Remington declined to comment for this article.)
Though the company was supposed to be hiring hundreds of people, workers said that the line appeared suspiciously sparse
The presence of the temp workers, who were exempt from the minimum average hourly wage in the development agreement, also served as a cautionary tale, a reminder of how much lower you could sink if you raised trouble. Temps started at $9.20 an hour with no benefits. Full-time workers, for their part, were often unaware that the tax-incentive package might entitle them to higher wages than they were receiving. And when they did realize, they were unsure what to do.
While I was in Huntsville, Remington employees told me that if they spoke to me for this article, they would be fired. One woman, a line worker, told me over the phone: “These people, they have ways of finding out if you talked. I talk to you, no ifs, ands or buts, I’m gone. It makes us feel they have something to hide. But we keep our mouths shut. Clock in, clock out.”
I eventually met a former employee, who asked to be identified by her first initial, D., and agreed to talk about her experience at Remington. D. started working full time on the Remington line in August 2015. She was 43 and divorced and moved to Alabama more than a decade earlier from Michigan, along with her 17-year-old son. In 2014 she was earning $10 an hour as a housekeeper at a hospital, but she left for a job at Remington after seeing a newspaper article in which the company promised a minimum average hourly wage of $19.50.
After taking her two-week course at A.I.D.T., D. started work. She was assigned to a boxing station, which was not on an assembly line but at a static counter where the workers stood side by side. The job was boring. She received the guns — they were long guns, for hunting — placed them in boxes, then weighed the boxes on a digital scale. If the scale displayed a red light, that meant D. had missed a part. When she opened her first paycheck, she saw that she was earning $12.36 an hour — gross. After taxes and benefits, her take-home pay amounted to $353.70 a week.
After two years, according to paystubs that D. shared with me, she was earning $14.16 an hour. ...
The gun industry in general doesn't pay worth a shyt. At least not that I've found to date and I've researched it and/or applied to several manufacturers over the years. I know of some that were paying less in 2014 than the 12.36 listed in the above article for jobs much more demanding in skill and training than packing guns in boxes. In fact, I haven't found anything that pays less for the skill level required and I've worked alot of different jobs in my life. A friend and former co-worker of mine in the gun industry put it this way in a conversation we were having about it one day.. "The gun industry as a whole relies on charity to survive. Most of the workers could make alot more money doing something else but they choose to build guns because that's what they love to do and the gun companies know it and count on it". After working in the industry myself for 10 years I completely agree. You can make more money delivering or packaging potato chips or running a forklift than you can building guns.
Remington has been quietly paying off lawsuits and lawyers to "handle' defective firearms since the 1950's. It cost them untold millions that couldn't go into R&D to bring innovative products out, or to build better guns. Remington shotguns were last maker to go to interchangeable tube barrels. Everyone else was doing it 15-20 years before Remington. They are STILL using that cheap ass reverse stamped checkering on many of their guns. Mossberg and everyone else gives you real checkering even on the cheapest guns they offer. Remington continued to use that God awful stuff on their top end guns well into the 1990's. They had numerous flops where they misjudged the market and have had serious QC issues since the 1970's.
Remington was circling the drain for years before Cerberus bought them out. They would have gone bankrupt years earlier had they not been bought out. Cerberus just managed to keep them artificially afloat long enough to suck money out of investors.
I read that article yesterday and found it very interesting. What they did shouldn't be legal IMHO. But it isn't the holding company that killed Remington. They just used a dying company to fleece investors with the false hope they could save it.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/05/01/magazine/remington-guns-jobs-huntsville.htmlThe news spread around Huntsville, Ala., in the winter of 2014. Remington, the country’s oldest gun maker, had decided to expand from its historic home in upstate New York to a gigantic former Chrysler factory near the airport. Workers at the new plant, the company said, would earn a minimum average of $19.50 an hour assembling shotguns, pistols, hunting rifles and AR-15-style semiautomatics. The city’s mayor wrote in a newspaper column that he was thrilled that Remington’s quest for a new factory space had ended in Huntsville. He calculated the typical annual salary as $42,500.
more This is what I read,
the part that the OP wanted to showcase and pontificate on,
Nothing more than stroking some false ego.
Wages did not kill Remington, which is the subject title.
I put the link in twice for you to read the whole article.
subject title is about bankruptcy, not wages
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/05/01/magazine/remington-guns-jobs-huntsville.htmlThe news spread around Huntsville, Ala., in the winter of 2014. Remington, the country’s oldest gun maker, had decided to expand from its historic home in upstate New York to a gigantic former Chrysler factory near the airport. Workers at the new plant, the company said, would earn a minimum average of $19.50 an hour assembling shotguns, pistols, hunting rifles and AR-15-style semiautomatics. The city’s mayor wrote in a newspaper column that he was thrilled that Remington’s quest for a new factory space had ended in Huntsville. He calculated the typical annual salary as $42,500.
more WTF is your point?
Employees making 19 dollars an hour is what killed Remington?
The typical financial genius here usually blames a Union,
Bonus points awarded for being new and innovative,
Employees getting paid, the nerve.
The point is he is a communist, communists have no economic reality. Lets not blame low grade union workmanship in NY , Trigger Lawsuit which was not handled correctly for any issues. I don't think their deal with Walmart did them any favors either. I want someone to name any company that has ever been bought by a private equity firm that survived and actually grew. They are the financial vampries of this world.
read the article. it's about economic reality in corporate America.
after seeing this private equity cycle play out countless times where the company that controls the company just turns into a vampire, one would think lenders would think twice about lending money to places like this and would demand the parent company to "kiss the paper" basically a guarantee to pay from the parent company IE cerebus in this case.
I've worked for two PE owned companies. Both started off as successful family owned companies. Both got to some where around $50MM-$100MM in business. Family decides to sell. PE is the easiest way to cash out. Unfortunate for the employees left behind. But, that's the truth of the matter.
Not sure how Remington got their current position. However, once you invite the vampires to the party, they generally stay until all of the blood is gone...
Hadn’t seen a picture of Dan Quayle in a while.
Remember the articles in the NRA magazine trying to convince us that Cerberus was okay because they were "gun people". Bullschit.
Remember the articles in the NRA magazine trying to convince us that Cerberus was okay because they were "gun people". Bullschit.
I remember that guy Kollitides running for the Board of Directors. Any time the “corporate” folks start trying to infiltrate your organization, you better look out. Those kinds of folks are more interested in protecting their profits than your rights..