This article below is from The Columbus Dispatch, written by Dan Gearino.  We think you will enjoy reading about the American workers who make Fiberglass Pipe Insulation.

Wrap operator Malissa Moran waits for a tube of pipe insulation while she boxes product in the pipe factory at Owens Corning’s flagship plant in central Ohio’s Newark. Owens Corning is the world’s leading producer of fiber-glass insulation, with its headquarters in Toledo. The 265-acre Newark Owens Corning plant employs about 580.

THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH 

NEWARK, Ohio — Insulation is a family business at Owens Corning’s facility here.

The multinational manufacturer has been in Newark since the 1930s, employing multiple generations of many of the same families.

The company, which has its world headquarters in Toledo, took some big hits during the recent economic downturn, with sales closely tied to the slumping residential and commercial construction markets. Now, better times have arrived, with the head count at the Newark facility holding steady at about 580 people after years of decreases.

Dennis Rogers
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH 

At the Owens Corning plant, family connections are so common that it wasn’t that unusual for Brian Houdeshell to have this experience when promoted to management: He was the direct supervisor of his father.

“I said, ‘If you give me any trouble, I'm going straight to Mom,’ ” said Mr. Houdeshell, 42, who oversees one of the largest production lines.

While the company has no official tally of its legacy employees — those whose parent or other close relative worked there — examples abound.

“These second, third, and fourth-generation people literally grew up with Owens Corning,” said Dennis Rogers, 43, the plant’s top manager.

Shawn Humphrey, 43, the leader of one of the plant’s unions, is the fourth generation of his family with the company. “I had two uncles who worked here, a cousin, my father, and one of his brothers,” he said, giving a partial list.

Many areas of the complex show their age, with cracked floors and dusty nooks and crannies. Most of the time, the work is hot. To help workers deal with heat, the company provides coolers filled with Popsicles and bottled water.

Owens Corning has about 15,000 employees in 27 countries. In Ohio, it has the Toledo headquarters, the Newark plant, a research and development center in Granville, and plants in Mount Vernon, Columbus, Tallmadge, Tiffin, and Medina.

The main product is fiber-glass insulation, followed by roof shingles and fiber-glass used to reinforce a variety of products.

The company is the largest insulation-maker in the country, with 16 percent of a $10.3 billion U.S. market, according to Freedonia Group, a Cleveland market-research firm. Competitors include Johns Manville, CertainTeed, and Dow Chemical.

“Indeed, in the mind of many consumers, Owens Corning’s pink Fiberglas insulation is synonymous with fiber-glass insulation,” said a 2013 report from the research firm. Fiberglass is the Owens Corning trade name for its product.

Businesses have been making things at the Newark site since the late 19th century, when the city was a national center for producing glass bottles.

Then, with Prohibition and the Great Depression, the glass industry suffered an economic catastrophe.

“They shut off the furnaces in the glass factories,” said Rori Leath, a staff member at The Works, a history and science museum in Newark. “The companies were looking for something to do.”

Starting in 1930, engineers for Owens-Illinois Inc., of Toledo came up with a way to make a fiber material from molten glass, according to history documents from Owens Corning. The research work was done by people at several Owens-Illinois facilities, including in Newark.

The product inspired Owens-Illinois to form a partnership with Corning Glass Co. of New York. In 1938, Owens Corning was spun off from its parents, with headquarters in Toledo.

Owens Corning officials say the Newark plant is, in many ways, the flagship — the oldest and one of the largest in the company. The complex covers 265 acres, with 40 acres indoors in more than a dozen buildings.

The Owens Corning plant has many products, including tubes of insulation that fit around utility pipes, blankets of insulation for houses, and thick sheets of insulation that are used in heating systems and kitchen appliances.

Fiber-glass begins as a mixture of crushed glass and other materials. It is melted down and then dropped into a spinning chamber that turns the glass into strands of wool-like fiber.

“The fiberizers are making cotton candy at 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit,” said Mark Arnold, 65, environmental leader at the plant.

He is a Newark native who has been with the company since 1967, when he worked summers while a student at Ohio State University.

He joined the company full-time in 1972, and was a manager at locations across the country before returning to the Newark plant in 1987.

Mr. Arnold said he was part of the team that made insulation for the Trans-Alaska oil pipeline in the 1970s. The work was done at a temporary plant in Washington state.

Last year, the company reported profit of $205 million, and sales of $5.3 billion.

The numbers mark a recovery after difficult times. The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2000, and emerged in 2006.

Then came the economic downturn, which was particularly bad for the housing and commercial construction markets, which provide the majority of the company’s sales.

The Newark plant went from about 950 employees in 2007 to a low of about 550 in 2011.

Mr. Rogers, the plant manager, started in that role in 2010, a time with “a lot of anxiety and uncertainty,” he said.

The company has added about 30 jobs since the recent low, although Mr. Rogers is cautious about saying that the work force is growing. Instead, he points to the things he knows for sure: The housing market is improving, which increases demand for the plant’s products. Also, the company spent about $30 million on equipment upgrades at the plant last year, a sign that Owens Corning plans to be in Newark for a long time.

“We’re positioned well into the future for providing greater security for the people we have,” he said.