Mount Union borough

Robin Footwear

In August 1958 a trade magazine's list of new plants in Pennsylvania carried a line for Mount Union: Robin Footwear Corp., with operations estimated to begin that month.

The state later described how the plant found its workers. In material from the Department of Public Instruction, quoted in a study dated January 11, 1961, the department said the company had moved from another state to a community where there had never been a shoe industry, so no one there had the skills. As soon as the key equipment was in place, 75 unemployed people were chosen for training, though the department goes on to count 150 trained and does not explain the difference. The public schools supplied a director, the instructors and the materials, and the trainees took the instruction on their own time. In ten weeks 150 people were trained, each with 50 to 150 hours of instruction, by making actual shoes. The 10,000 finished pairs went to state supported institutions for the use of the inmates. The department said all but 10 of the 150 were eventually put to work, and it quoted the company's president as saying that without the training program "we probably could not have made the move to Mount Union."

A 1966 patrons' list in a Mapleton centennial booklet also named Robin Footwear Corp. of Mount Union.

In 1976 the company and its workers each turned to Washington over imports, under the Trade Act of 1974. On September 10 a petition from the company, at 208 North Division Street, was accepted for filing, and the Commerce Department began an investigation into whether increased imports had contributed importantly to the separation of the firm's workers. On October 7 the Labor Department received a petition, dated September 29, from the Boot and Shoe Workers' Union on behalf of the workers and former workers.

The Labor Department found that customers were buying more imports and ordering less from Robin. Employment had fallen in each month since February 1976. In the third quarter of 1976 it was 28 percent below the quarter before and 35 percent below the same quarter of 1975. Estimated production, based on orders received, was down 10 percent in the first eight months of 1976 compared with the same months of 1975. Imports of women's nonrubber footwear rose from 89.5 million pairs in the first six months of 1975 to 109.5 million in the first six months of 1976.

On December 23, 1976, the department signed a certification that increased imports had "contributed importantly" to the total or partial separation of the company's workers. The notice, printed in the Federal Register on January 4, 1977, explains that the phrase means "a cause which is important but not necessarily more important than any other cause." Workers separated on or after January 31, 1976 could apply for adjustment assistance.

The magazine Commerce America listed 340 certified workers from the company and noted that its numbers were approximate where available.

In 1977 the company went back to Washington. A new petition from Robin Footwear Corporation, at 208 North Division Street, was accepted for filing on March 29, 1977, and the Commerce Department opened a new investigation into whether increased imports had contributed importantly to the separation of the firm's workers, or the threat of it, and to a decrease in sales or production. In April the Commerce Department certified the firm as eligible to apply for trade adjustment assistance, according to Commerce America.

A directory of Economic Development Administration projects lists a $1,000,000 business development loan to the company, obligated August 1, 1977. A later edition, dated March 31, 1978, still lists the company's entry.

The plant did not last. In the program American Interests, originally broadcast January 20, 1983, a company vice president said the plant had shut down "in October of this past year" with about 200 people working there. He said a second factory, at Portage, had been shut down and liquidated about eight years earlier, and that the company got into trouble mainly because of imports. The program said Robin had once had two factories employing 500 people.

A list of closed shoe factories printed in the Congressional Record on April 12, 1984 puts Robin Footwear, Mount Union, under 1982.

A Federal Register notice of December 12, 1991 lists the Robin Footwear facility at 208 North Division Street among deletions from a federal hazardous waste docket for federal facilities. It names the Economic Development Administration and places the facility in the category "Formerly Federally Owned." The notice does not say when the government held the property or when it gave it up.

Checked against the record. The federal notices, the Commerce America issues and the 1961 study were checked against the original documents. The closing date rests on a January 1983 broadcast, in which a company vice president says the plant shut down in October 1982, and on a 1982 entry in the Congressional Record list of April 12, 1984. The broadcast calls the company Robin Footwear of Pennsylvania and never names Mount Union, so the federal notices and the Congressional Record are what tie it to the town. A 1966 trucking application lists Robin Footwear Co., Mount Union, as a supporting shipper on a route carrying shoe supplies from New York to Portage. That fits the second factory the broadcast describes but does not prove it. Still open: the day production began, what became of the 1976 company petition, whether the loan was repaid, and when the government held the property and gave it up. The disbursement column in the 1977 directory is hard to read, so this story does not say how much of the loan was paid out. No local newspaper account of the company, the loan, the closing or any later sale has turned up. A 1991 county inventory of historic industrial sites describes a business taking over a long vacant shoe factory on Division Street. It does not name the shoe firm, and no deed or report ties Robin's building to it, so this story does not say they are the same building.

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