A down-home, socialist company

Established 53 years ago, Cianbro employs 2,000 workers up and down the East Coast. Although it does only about thirty percent of its business in Maine, it is headquartered in tiny Pittsfield, where it employs 300 people. Ranked 108th in size among American construction firms, it is one of the largest non-union builders. For the Amethyst job, it advertised for workers in Mississippi, irritating Maine's unions. But the company claims that the vast majority of the new hires will be from Maine. It is seeking electricians, welders, pipe fitters, riggers, carpenters, and others who will typically earn between $15 and $25 an hour.

The name is pronounced "CHIN-bro." The name of the Italian immigrant family that founded it, Cianchette, is pronounced "CHIN-ket." The family is one of Maine's great rags-to-riches stories. The legendary Cianchette brothers – Carl, Ken, Bud, and Chuck – turned Pittsfield into their own principality in the 1950s and 1960s. Not only were they the town's chief employers, they also got themselves elected to office (two became state senators), and they had close to a private air force of historic planes.

The company's experience is largely in building bridges, dams, paper mills, piers, and manufacturing plants such as National Semiconductor's in South Portland. It built the Portland Fish Pier, Merrill Pier in South Portland, and the Casco Bay Bridge. It has had a construction yard at the waterfront's western end, at Ricker's Wharf, for 35 years. Gross income in 2001 was about $360 million. Vigue would not divulge profits, but "we have very high expectations."

Cianbro is famous for its success, but it was once infamous for being an unsafe company to work for. Injury rates have dropped significantly in recent years, "but we're not yet where we want to be," Leavitt comments.

I know this when I take a rainy tour on the slippery decks of Amethyst 4 with Peter Vigue as my guide. He obsesses in making sure that every employee wears safety glasses. "Watch your step," he tells me at every stairway. Every Cianbro employee we encounter wears a hard hat.

When I visit it, the rig is not yet moored to the pier, and we use an aluminum skiff with an outboard to get to it. The crew's quarters are still empty metal caverns. On the compass bridge, control panels are still shrink-wrapped. On one deck, rain drips on stacks of microwave ovens brought aboard for the crew to heat up their lunches. The boss tells men to move them out of the rain. It is a clean, orderly workplace. Vigue obviously is compulsive about safety and order.

Could this be partly show for a journalist? The smiles are forced on the workers' faces as the CEO escorts his guest and accompanying photographer around. "Is everything okay? That's what I like to hear!" Vigue shouts heartily.

The smiles needn't be so forced because, in a way, these employees are his boss. They own Cianbro under the federal Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) law, though control is vested in only 220 people in management who decide the board of directors. The Cianchette brothers now only own about five percent; they've been bought out, although Ival "Bud" Cianchette, 76, father of Republican gubernatorial nominee Peter, is still chairman of the board.

As I clamber around Amethyst 4, I think about Peter Cianchette, the pro-business conservative – despite his immigrant family's long devotion to the Democratic Party – whom Vigue tells me he advises. Peter has publicly denigrated a universal health-care system as "socialist." I wonder what he thinks of the fact that his family company – now owned in a set-up that in Europe would be celebrated by socialists as "worker control" – is receiving the rather substantial benefits of another "socialist" set-up – and on public property, to boot.

For, as it turns out, the United States Maritime Administration sends checks to Cianbro for this oil-rig work. The government has guaranteed $342 million in bank loans to Petrodrill in one of the Maritime Administration's biggest guarantees, and in the complicated arrangement it pays Cianbro directly. Even though Petrodrill is a foreign entity, the U.S. government assists it in order to flow money to Cianbro.

Or, as Jean McKeever, associate administrator for shipbuilding in the Maritime Administration, expresses it, government assistance is given "to have the work done in American shipyards." Cianbro and Portland probably would not have the work without this corporate welfare.

Peter Cianchette thinks government health-insurance guarantees for working men and women are bad. But are profit guarantees for the corporations good? Is it another case of, as the old saying goes, socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor?

The business world is such a contradiction, a muddy mixture of government-hating conservatives who suck millions from government nipples and hard-nosed executives who gush mushy platitudes. On this last point, Cianbro has a heavily inspirational corporate culture. "No one in this room is smarter than all of us," commands a sign in every Cianbro room. In its effort to enforce groupthink, the Cianbro culture is virtually Japanese. Employees begin the workday with group stretching exercises.

Construction workers? Stretch- ing exercises?

"We're industrial athletes," Vigue explains, with a gleam in his eyes.

What happens if someone doesn't want to join in?

"They all want to," he says ominously.

As of next January 1, there will be no smoking on any Cianbro work site, even on breaks.

"We want healthy and safe employees," Vigue says in his perpetually enthusi- astic way.

But at the very top of the whiteboard in David Leavitt's office is the bottom line: "Project goal: to make money." Vigue wouldn't tell me how exactly much money the oil-rig project is worth to Cianbro, but he says it's over $100 million.

The romance of industry

After my delightfully drenching visit to Amethyst 4, I repair to work on my notes on a red-and-white-checked tablecloth at an old-favorite restaurant, Boone's on Custom House Wharf. I sip the always-delicious fish chowder, enjoying the kitschy nautica on the walls.

I am thankful that large remnants of the old waterfront exist. Despite the yuppification that has brought lawyers' offices, organic-everything boutiques, and the Evie Cianchette Block to Commercial Street, there are still many funky bars around. Workingmen with soiled clothes and three-day beards mix with the pretty, trust-fund moms pushing their chic strollers.

Why do Portlanders want a working waterfront? In addition to the appeal of tradition, of nostalgia, and of the romance of industry – the vitality and, one might say, the beauty that even that famous critic of industry Thoreau recognized – a working waterfront gives working Portlanders a choice of something other than being servants of the tourists or the rich.

Yes, business is confident and serene, alert and adventurous, especially if it gets the aid of the government. Cianbro, that good ol' socialist Maine company, no stranger to my old waterfront beat on Commercial Street, is helping the commercial beat go on.