Locks and Security News: your weekly locks and security industry newsletter
17th April 2024 Issue no. 701

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Master Lock Co brings the work back home

Master Lock Co's 90-year-old factory in Milwaukee, USA, is working seven days a week, three shifts per day producing its combination locks - a change from two years ago, when the machines normally ran just a few hours a day because it was ordering more padlocks from suppliers in China instead of making them itself.

Why the change?

"I can manufacture combination locks in Milwaukee for less of a cost than I can in China," says Bob Rice, a senior vice president.

The machine in Milwaukee is about 30 times faster then the Chinese factories the company had been buying from, more than making up for the difference in wages.

The factory has added about 78 employees over the past two years, boosting its work force to 440.

Part of a growing trend, General Electric Co. and Boeing are also among the small group of US companies that are boosting production at their US factories. Numerous factors are driving the shift, including rising wages in parts of Asia, surging fuel prices, and the cost and complexity of transporting goods across the Pacific.

Automation also helps tilt the balance toward the United States. Bruce Crass, the Master Lock plant's general manager, estimates that his plant - where the average employee oversees the operation of six high-speed machines - produces 24,000 locks a day with about only one-sixth the number of workers needed by the company's Chinese suppliers and rivals.

Many international manufacturers of goods ranging from running shoes to refrigerators have shifted much of their production overseas over the past few decades, chasing the low unit prices that foreign factories could offer as a result of their lower wages.

But over time, executives say, much of those savings have been erased by other costs that crept up - goods damaged in transit, the need for travelling quality-control staffs, and the need to maintain higher stock levels as a hedge against delays in shipping.

Perhaps with rising unemployment, together with the ecological argument that shipping goods half way around the world, when they could be made just as cost-effectively more locally, and usually at better quality, but with a much lower carbon footprint, we'll see this trend being adopted in the UK and Europe.

6th July 2011