Dispatch

Last toy manufacturer in Amsterdam to close

By Craig Fox and Steven Cook
Gazette Reporter

September 2, 2000
AMSTERDAM - The city's last toy manufacturer is to close its doors by year's end, sending more than 130 jobs overseas and dealing yet another blow to the beleagured Amsterdam economy.

Representatives of Esquire Novelty Co.'s parent company informed its employees Thursday that the Forest Avenue plant is to shut down, said Joseph Gorecki, vice president and general manager of Esquire. The manufacturing operation is moving to China.

"If I can't find something, I don't know what I'll do," Esquire assembly line worker Helen Dado said Friday afternoon at Tuman's Restaurant, within view of the factory.

"I don't know where anybody's going to go," said Dado, who spent the last 11 years helping to make toy cap guns, jump ropes and other toys. "Some are talking about going back to school. Some were talking about moving out of town."

Esquire follows three other toy manufacturers that have left Amsterdam in the last dozen years _ Hasbro, Coleco and Buddy L.

It also follows recent announcements that a Kmart superstore and Mohawk Finishing are to soon close. Those two closings will leave more than 400 without jobs.

"The work force in Amsterdam has been through this before, but it doesn't make it any easier," Gorecki said, noting the irony of announcing the closing four days before Labor Day.

Dan Shure, president of Chicago-based Strombecker Corp., Esquire's parent company, flew to Amsterdam to break the news of the plant's impending closure to the 131 employees at a Thursday afternoon meeting, Gorecki said.

Rumors of the shutdown had been circulating in the factory for days leading up to the closing, Dado said.

Lower sales and less work indicated trouble at the plant, Gorecki said. Strombecker officials called earlier in the week to ask for names of city and county officials, Gorecki said. "I knew it wasn't good news."

City and county officials said they were caught off guard by the announcement. Mayor John Duchessi said he was unaware of problems at the company until Strombecker officials faxed him the news Thursday.

"We had no idea this was going to happen," Duchessi said.

The plant could close as early as Nov. 1, but is likely to continue operations for several weeks after that, Gorecki said.

The company, which employs two shifts with some workers coming in on Saturdays, was already gearing up for its busiest annual quarter, the three months leading up to Christmas, Gorecki said.

Duchessi speculated that the closing was the result of simple economics: The company could get cheaper labor in China.

"The difference here is we've done all we can do to retain jobs and create jobs," Duchessi said.„

The company has operated in the five-story building next to the Mohasco Complex since it moved upstate to Amsterdam in 1968.

The plant's closing comes almost exactly eight years after an arsonist burned much of the abandoned Mohasco Complex to the ground at the end of August 1992. Esquire's building was spared.

Esquire was purchased by Strombecker during the early 1970s.

Esquire did $20 million in sales in 1998, the most recent data available.

That year the plant underwent a $700,000 expansion. More than $200,000 of that was provided by a grant from the Empire State Development Agency.

The company said the expansion was intended to maintain the plant's competitiveness and keep jobs from moving to another state. The goal was to increase the plant's work force to 175.

"It looked like all was well, and we were lulled into thinking everything was fine," Duchessi said.

Employing hundreds of workers, three national companies _ Hasbro, Buddy L and Coleco _ filled some of the vacant factories and replaced some of the jobs lost by the city's carpet industry demise.

Coleco left more than a decade ago. Buddy L, a division of SLM International, relocated in 1995 and Hasbro departed a year later.

At least a quarter of the workers affected by this week's closing are Latino, Alex Torres, founder of Centro Civico, estimated. Torres said the organization might help in retraining workers.

"It doesn't say too much about Amsterdam," Esquire worker Dado, 37, said. "I told [my husband] all the time: `I don't like it there, I don't like it there.'

"But, I mean, it's a job. I had my insurance and everything."


Posted September 10, 2000