It's People That Count

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After Welbilt has done a job for a military installation, it can be pretty sure of getting repeat business -- but only from that installation. "Every time we have contact with a new agency," he explains, "we have to go through the same song and dance of proving ourselves -- in ways that a nonminority company wouldn't have to.

"The private corporations are skeptical, too, but they're more likely to go along with the set-asides," perhaps in part because they're afraid of losing their contracts by ignoring the rules, comments Mariotta. "Some of our commercial customers first came to us because of the set-asides," he adds, "but when they saw that we did excellent work ahead of schedule, they stayed with us because of that."

The toughest part of doing business in Fort Apache, he notes, is suffering the slings and arrows of government and corporation officials who take a dim view of the place. "The first thing they say is 'Oh my God! It's all bombed out! What kind of a company can this be?' They assume that we're all macheteswingers and spear-throwers," says Mariotta. "You say minority, and they look at you like you had two left hands. They think we're too left-handed to produce, but here we are, producing."

According to Mariotta, the people of the South Bronx are an asset rather than a handicap to Welbilt, partly because they're eager to acquire skills that will help them advance. Welbilt's employees include a score of blacks, 15 East Indians and Pakistanis, 32 Jewish emigres from the Soviet Union (most of whom are engineers) and 10 native-born white Americans. Almost all the rest are Hispanic. About 90% of the work force comes from the South Bronx.

"The executive corps, I have to shanghai them and bring them in. But the other people are local," says Mariotta. Most, he adds, would be collecting welfare if they weren't working for Welbilt.

Mariotta tells one story after another of employees who started working for Welbilt at minimum wage and are now making $20,000 or $30,000 a year. A man he hired as a driver is now in charge of the company's shipping department. Another, who was living in a cellar and collecting welfare, now heads the purchasing department.

Not even a booster like Mariotta would claim that the South Bronx is teeming with skilled labor. In this age of high technology, tool-and-die makers are hard to find anywhere, let alone in Fort Apache. Welbilt's solution is to train its own workers, a task made easier by the company's investment in computerized machinery.

With the computerized equipment, Mariotta believes a worker "can acquire five years of expertise in six months." The sophisticated machines perform automatically many tasks that tool-and-die makers once had to perform by hand.

"Most employers that left or were driven out of the Bronx, besides complaining about the atmosphere, said that the people here cannot be trained to do skilled jobs," says Fred Neuberger. "We have proven that to be wrong."

Welbilt's employees seem to be as loyal to the company as Mariotta is to the South Bronx. "Nobody ever quits," says David Epstein, director of special projects for Welbilt. "The last guy to quit here left about two years ago."

The employees' loyalty has been carefully cultivated by Mariotta through frequent salary raises and promotions, an open invitation to see him personally about problems on the job, and a paternalism that includes lending money for car repairs, medical bills, and unanticipated expenses. To Mariotta, this personal concern makes good business sense. "If people are worried, their work is going to suffer," he says. He also believes in tangible rewards for productivity, and once gave each of his 10 foremen a $1,000 bonus for each month they met their production schedule.

Since a large proportion of Welbilt's employees are members of fundamentalist churches, Mariotta set aside space and equipped a chapel for them in the plant. He says it was his own faith in God that made him try to start a company again after each of his failures.

As a test of his faith, Mariotta gives money to the beggars he encounters on the street -- an impulse most New Yorkers have learned to suppress. Mariotta considers these personal handouts to be different from the welfare system he deplores.

Nor does he see any contradiction between his disapproval of welfare and his enthusiastic pursuit of government aid for Welbilt. The way he views it, his company has saved the government far more in welfare payments, as well as in the cost of metal parts, than it has received in assistance.

This year set-asides account for about 40% of Welbilt's business, a percentage, says Mariotta, that is falling. In addition to the set-asides, Welbilt has benefited from a Small Business Administration program that guarantees loans for minority-owned businesses. Welbilt could become ineligible for SBA assistance and minority-business aid as early as next year, according to the partners. The company's assets grew from $589,540 in 1976 to $6,735,430 in 1980.

As Welbilt continues to grow, so does its need for space. The company's original headquarters was a 20,000-squarefoot former garage. When Welbilt expanded a few blocks away to a three-story, one-acre plant formerly owned by a shoe company, it retained the old building to house one of its manufacturing operations. Now the company is taking over a third building, a former factory that, like the other two, sits virtually in the shadow of Yankee Stadium.

With this expansion in the South Bronx, Mariotta is again reaffirming his commitment to an area other executives have found inhospitable. Not once, he asserts, has he been seriously tempted to move Welbilt to the suburbs.

"These are my people," Mariotta says. "I understand them. If I run away from my people, I am running away from myself."

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