Cleaning up the Rustbelt

Source: Exec Digital Canada

Date :5/8/2008 12:55:50 AM

Regeneration of Ohio’s industrial heartland has been just one of Jack H Schron’s passions: now he is hoping to step onto a broader political stage

Written by John O’Hanlon

Don’t judge a place by its name. Despite having as its bard the Canadian rock band The Tragically Hip, who have recorded a track of that name, Chagrin Falls, Ohio, is no Lake Woebegone. Rather it is a small but thriving suburb of Cleveland with a strong sense of community and one of the best high schools in the whole of the United States.

That’s what Jack Schron thinks anyway, who was born and grew up there. “Maybe it’s just a peanut town but the people have high expectations for their children and for themselves and everyone works hard to achieve those expectations. I always bless the day my parents settled on that community for us to grow up in.”

Schron sat on the Chagrin Falls Board of Education for twelve years, seven of those as president or vice-president, which says a lot about his commitment to education. But he’s better known as the president of his family firm Jergens Inc and as founder of Tooling University, the online academy that trains engineers.

Jergens Inc

Jergens was founded by Schron’s father and grandfather in 1942 to manufacture specialty products for engineering workshops. The company moved four times as it grew. Eight years ago, when it ran out of space, it would have been easy to move to a Greenfield site, but as vice-chair of the Clean Ohio Council he wanted to show a lead in brownfield reclamation, so he placed his 130,000-square-foot manufacturing and office complex on the former Collinwood Railyard of the old New York to Chicago railroad, a polluted brownfield site. “It’s a model of regeneration, with the Cleveland Foodbank and the Cleveland Clinic both located right next to our factory. We have visitors every day, and they leave with a really positive view of manufacturing. Our belief is that we can compete on a world stage by manufacturing in Cleveland.”

The Jergens project gave rise to a state-wide initiative, he says, with the former Republican governor Bob Taft announcing, from the lobby of the new facility, $400 million of State funding to the Clean Ohio Foundation to clean the state’s extensive brownfield. Programs like that don’t always survive changes in administration, but the new Democrat governor Ted Strickland not only wanted Schron to continue as vice-chair, but endorsed a proposal to commit a further $400 million. “That’s $800 million going towards cleaning up sites, most of which are in inner cities whether in Columbus, Cincinnati, Dayton, Canton, Akron or Toledo. They didn’t even change the name of the program!”

Ethical, moral and legal

Over the last four years the Schron Family Foundation has donated $400,000 to the Cleveland Foundation. “They allocate the interest on the fund to very valid community projects,” he says.

His social conscience comes from his mother and father, and ultimately from God, he says. “My maternal grandfather was a minister who preached sermons every Sunday for 50 years. A rock like that is a great foundation, but I do believe we make an individual choice when we decide to do the right thing. You shouldn’t have to refer back to your parents all the time, these sentiments should simply be there in every decision you make. Anyway that is how I have tried to run my company. I won’t review our managers’ decisions unless they are unethical, immoral or illegal. You are free to make your own decisions and your own mistakes as long as they measure up to these three principles. You can make dumb decisions – nobody has a license against that!”

But Schron is not the kind of person to claim the moral high ground. “There’s no middle ground. You are either honest or not. That said, I have probably fallen short of these principles lots of times in my life. But in business I do believe that if you screw up you ought to tell your employees, or your customer or whoever is affected, right up front. If Bill Clinton taught us anything it is, get all your bad news out there in the open, then you can move on!”

Reality check

Schron believes that America needs a reality check. “The question comes up every four years or so and now, guess what, they are all getting religion and talking about it again! The candidates say we are losing all these jobs to China and Mexico, and of course it is the manufacturing jobs they are talking about, though they don’t always say that. The politicians whine about it, but do they really look at the legislation they pass that is encouraging people to want to take their manufacturing jobs overseas? “I’d like to see the politicians recognize the multiple value of a manufacturing job and how it is critical to our economy.”

We’ll compete just fine if we have a level playing field, he insists. “I’d like to ensure that if we are going to make marketing arrangements with other countries, both sides adhere to them. I think the burden of administrative legislation is very heavy. Just to do documentation for the Department of Labor can take three or four days. It’s death by 1,000 cuts – not one thing, but a series of little things, and we are carrying 25 to 30 percent additional cost compared with our Chinese or Indian competitors.”

Divorce from oil

Not that he’s unrealistic himself. He concedes that even Jergens might one day make some low tech products in China. And he doesn’t entirely blame trade liberalization for the exodus of manufacturing. “Let’s just make sure that free trade is creating a level playing field. If it is, fair enough if jobs go overseas, yet I am not sure that Boeing’s airplane have to be made in Mexico, or other critical parts for our defense systems. But it’s created a market down there too for American goods and the balance is more even than people perceive right now. If it wasn’t for all the oil we bring in from there my understanding is that we would have a positive balance of trade with Mexico.”

All that oil is a worry to him. “We need to get divorced from oil at some point, I think. But the big automotive companies got married to oil so long ago that the divorce is going to be messy. Still, we are smart people. If the oil ran out tomorrow the auto industry would have to find alternatives. Maybe the high price of oil is a good thing, like a drug. If drugs are cheap people will stay hooked.”

Big thinkers like T Boone Pickens, who wants to put serious wind generating capacity into America, appeal. “I think it’s excellent. We want to put windmills on our property here. That’s not tree-hugging. Most businesses want to go green not because of any paternal interest in the environment, but because it makes financial sense. I think most business people will ask as I do, ‘what is the net gain for society, for the business and our employees?’ Many green initiatives make economic sense when you analyze them.”

This is no quick conversion. As soon as he took over at Jergens more than 20 years ago, Schron phased out the use of lead in all of his products. Today he exclusively uses vegetable based cutting and lubricating fluids. “They actually outperform the petroleum based cutting oils we used to use. The secondary benefits are that we don’t get the infections the employees and dermatology problems people used to get on their hands.”

A political manifesto

For a lawyer, he is unenthusiastic about law or administration graduates who go straight into politics and presume to run people’s lives without wide exposure to the real world. “After our forefathers won our independence, people took up politics in later life after they had done something else. Being a ‘politician’ was never a job which was never a job description, but now career politicians they start at 25 or 30 and that’s the only job they ever had. Now that’s not good from society’s standpoint. I believe you should do other things and bring some other expertise to the table before telling people how to run the country!”

So now, into his sixties, Schron is not, he tells me, contemplating retirement. “I’ll retire when they shovel dirt onto me!” he laughs. Instead he is planning his next career. This will involve running for high political office at a serious national level. An independent at heart, Jack leans more toward the Republican side. Less government, and letting people grow as individuals is better than have a huge handout program, which weakens you. Don’t give them a fish, he says; don’t even teach them to fish. “If I teach you how to run a CNC machine I’ll teach you how to build the fishing pole, the boat, and feed the whole nation!”

Click here to view the full interview with Jack H Schron