Jobs for disabled shift from coal to solar

EBENSBURG, Pa. -- The spick-and-span floor at the Cambria County Association for the Blind & Handicapped is an unlikely place to chronicle the decline of coal.

The organization's branch in this town about 65 miles east of Pittsburgh is a large manufacturing space where metal wire gets chopped, bent, welded and dipped in plastic, producing millions of industrial hangers a year. For more than 30 years, most of those hangers have ended up in underground coal mines. They hold cables in the majority of Pennsylvania's mines and are scattered in 25 countries around the world.

Coal, more than any other industry, helped build this nonprofit organization into one of the nation's largest work programs for people with disabilities.

The association and its longtime president, Richard Bosserman, has seen its share of ebbs and flows in the coal business. But the current downturn feels different. Coal company chief executives say that, too, as do financial analysts. The rebound, if one is to materialize, will not be wholly restorative to the industry.

The Cambria County Association for the Blind & Handicapped's coal business began to decline several years ago as U.S. mine closures accelerated and foreign coal began to suffer as well. The organization has a nice chunk of business in Australia, which ships a lot of its coal to China. But as China's appetite for the fuel retreated from predicted levels, Australian mines slowed, too.

This year, Bosserman predicted, the association will do $1.5 million less in mining sales than in 2014.

Other energy work has picked up some of the slack. The Cambria County Association for the Blind & Handicapped supplies hangers for utilities' power lines and petrochemical plants.

But its big new bet has been in solar power.

For two years, the nonprofit organization has been developing a hanger that would bundle the wires coming out of solar panels. Today, most cables on solar farms are either buried, which makes it hard to diagnose integrity issues, or contained in electrical cable trays. Hangers, the association reasons, are a cheaper alternative.

The association developed a prototype and persuaded a local high school with a solar array to let the organization hook on mock wires for brochure photos. Then, its sales force blanketed solar conferences and collected recommendations from people regarded in the field.

It recently got its first major order for 400,000 hangers destined for a huge solar field in Utah. The project will yield $1.6 million over the next year, more than offsetting the loss from coal.

There are negotiations with other major solar developers, Bosserman said. In July, a salesman packed a suitcase with 1,000 hangers and flew to San Francisco to explore another large solar application.

"It's almost like what happened to us in the early '80s," he said. "Once we got started in mine hangers and mining companies started to hear about us, suddenly it just expanded."

The organization got its start in 1927 in rented workrooms at an old school in Johnstown. It taught blind employees to weave rugs and use sewing machines, selling the products at a store front.

Four decades later, Bosserman, who was blinded in a hunting accident as a teenager, became the agency's executive director. Under his leadership, the organization entered the mining industry in 1977.

Since the 1980s, mining and tunneling business made up the majority of the association's revenue. The organization was able to expand to two locations and now employs about 400 people, including 300 with severe intellectual or physical disabilities.

Last fiscal year, the association's revenue was $15 million, more than $10 million of which came from sales and the rest from social service funding, investment income and grants. It made $5 million in profit, which is reinvested into expanding the organization's factories and into providing social and recreational services to its workers.

Employees in the association's sewing department make minimum wage or more, Bosserman said, while metal benders work on a per-piece rate -- a few cents for each bend on a metal hanger -- that he said averages to about $10 an hour.

"We have disabled people making $1.50 an hour, and we have people making $11," Bosserman said. "We employ people no one else will employ."

The employees come to work whether or not there's heavy demand. When inventory is high, they attend classes with the rehab staff, learning independent life skills.

There are horseback riding trips and therapeutic drum classes. The company pays for outings to neighborhood events and restaurants where they can learn how to order off a menu or make change.

Such opportunities are far more frequent now than several years ago, according to the Cambria County Association for the Blind & Handicapped's rehab staff, with slower sales in coal.

"You can't pick up a coal magazine without seeing it," Fuller said. "I don't think we've hit the bottom yet."

Business on 08/11/2015

Upcoming Events