Lott Industries Feels Job Market’s Sting – An Autism Organization Story

In 1993, Lott Industries, a nonprofit organization that trains adults with developmental disabilities to do light assembly work and other tasks, became the only program of its kind to earn the auto industry’s prestigious Quality One supplier award.

Now, Lott and its 1,200 workers are in danger of becoming another casualty of recession. Seven major contracts vanished in late 2007, representing 80% of its business, when Ford Motor Co. closed a nearby stamping plant. Next, in 2008, went the General Motors contract for truck transmission parts. Earlier this year, business with a Honda parts supplier dropped off. Cleaning and other nonautomotive work also dried up as companies brought those functions back in-house to keep their own employees busy.

In the 1940′s Josina Lott, a teacher who believed that children with developmental disabilities should have the chance to make a living, founded Lott Industries. All of Lott’s workers have developmental impairments. Some are in wheelchairs. Others have autism.

Lott had scored its first contract with Ford in 1980, stapling felt pads to pieces that later went into the racy and powerful Thunderbird. Workers assembled parts in an old industrial three-story building. When elevators broke, employees formed lines handing goods to one another and then down the steps to get them out the door in time. That early relationship helped Lott become essentially self-sustaining, enabling it to buy its own equipment and operate largely without subsidies from the state or federal government.

Now Joan Uhl Browne, Lott’s president, and her small staff have been scrambling to replace the auto contracts. They’ve cast a wide net, cold-calling businesses offering to label bottles and bundle linoleum. While dining at the bar of a local restaurant, Ms. Uhl Browne overheard a conversation between a father and son regarding their bookselling business. They needed to unload unwanted volumes. “I butted in,” she says. A deal to sell Lott’s document destruction services was later struck.

Lott is also now changing the way it does business, focusing on green energy to weather the storm; they are developing new products and partnerships, such as grants for green projects with Ohio universities.

“We’ve focused a lot on recycling. A lot of products we want to produce that are either good for our folks, good for our community or good for the environment.”

Read the original articles here and here.