Rochester, N.Y. - Machines fill a 100-thousand square foot industrial building in Henrietta. In one room use them to mold lenses. In another a different process produces different lenses for grinding and polishing.
Six years ago much of this equipment belonged to Kodak, and was used for cranking out components for disc cameras. Then the company shipped its optical imaging division to China.
“We brought the process machines and engineers over there and we taught them how to make lenses,” says Chip Simmons. “We were doing all we could to fight for our jobs but it wasn’t enough.”
After 36 years Simmons lost his job.
24 years for Brian Bundschuh. “It was tough, it was scary,” he says. Now both men work for Rochester Precision Optical.
That company uses technology developed by Kodak, to run machines that still carry yellow asset tags from when they were Kodak property. But the founder of the new company discovered something else when he opened shot with a workforce of 27 people who had been laid off by Kodak.
“Really the best thing wasn’t the technology or the equipment, it was the people,” explains Bundschuh. “We were a family and many of the same people came over here.”
There are no numbers to determine how many of Rochester’s 23-thousand small businesses have been started by former Kodak employees. But small business alone has been responsible for every new private sector job here since the recession that followed the September 11th terrorist attacks.
Many are thriving. Rochester Precision Optical has grown to a workforce of almost 200 and will more jobs when an $11 million dollar expansion is complete later this spring. And from the original group of laid off Kodak workers, it has hired others from the company as late as last year.
“I believed in what we were doing,” Chip Simmons says about his Kodak days. “I believed as an American labor force we could compete with anybody in the world.” In this new job he says “we were very excited to finally prove what we could do.”
