A steelworker solution: when all else failed they bought the shop.

• Author: Clifford, Stephen
• Position: Sharpsville Quality Products, Sharpsville, PA

The Shenango Valley, which hugs the border between Ohio and Pennsylvania, is perhaps most famous for Shenango Lake. According to Trailer Life magazine, "If you're interested in bragging-size crappies, Shenango is the place to go." But the valley is also home to small, quiet, middle-class towns where most citizens aspire to a simple life: raising a family, holding down a good job, and the occasional chance to hook and land some of those famous crappies.

If you want good fishing, stay on the lake. But if you want to see a community that took control of its future, go about six miles south of the lake, past well-kept homes, green lawns, churches, and sweetcorn stands, to Sharpsville, Pennsylvania.

In the 1980s, the leveraged-buyout craze reached beyond Wall Street to smalltown America. It sucked Sharpsville's largest employer into its vortex, choked it of capital investment, and then shut it down. What makes the Sharpsville story different is that the workers used every tool they could, including a forty-two-day plant occupation, to save their livelihoods. The community rallied around the workers' efforts and together they resurrected Sharpsville Quality Products from the ruins of bankruptcy.

Since 1907, the Sharpsville ingot-mold foundry of Shenango, Inc., had been a stable employer. Speaking of his early days as a laborer there, Jeff Burns says, "It was a good place to work - good money, good benefits, and a good bunch of guys to work with. These guys went to school together, they grew up together. It was close-knit, like family."

The family feeling was fostered by the Snyders, the local civic-minded owners. The Snyders provided new goalposts for the high-school football field, in an area where the sport is almost a religion. Even after the Snyders moved out of Sharpsville, they continued to maintain the football field.

When William Snyder II retired, the plant was purchased through a leveraged buyout and became part of Shenango Group, Inc. At the time of the buyout, most of the 300 local employees were represented by the United Steel Workers of America. They figured the new owners would scrap the plant for cash and leave the hard-hit community with yet another wound to lick.

But in the late 1980s, the steel industry turned around, and the Shenango Group began making money, precipitating two crucial changes. First, the parent company pursued increased market share by cutting prices and purchasing other ingot-mold foundries. Second, management at the Sharpsville facility embraced the new trend of employee participation, which allowed shop steward Jeff Swogger and his co-workers to learn the business. The information they gathered would be crucial to their buyout effort three years later.

Shenango's debt load and the 1990 industry downturn led to the closing of many plants. The Sharpsville foundry, however, remained competitive, thanks to labor-management participation and shop-floor cost committees. For example, the workers' compensation committee drastically reduced the number of claims by putting pe6ple back to work on light duty and getting rid of frivolous claims. Employee participation, concessions, and the union's creative money-saving ideas were not enough; lacking cash for capital improvements, the Sharpsville plant, too, seemed...