Whirlpool's decision to stay in U.S. has helped make it one of the Chattanooga area's key companies

Staff photo by Doug Strickland / A worker removes a pressed appliance part from a press machine at the Whirlpool manufacturing plant in Cleveland, Tenn.

CLEVELAND, Tenn. - Don Lorton had just finished an hour-long visit to Whirlpool Corp.'s huge oven-making plant, built only four years ago and now Bradley County's largest employer.

"It's impressive," said the retired president of Maytag Corp., which Whirlpool bought out in 2006. "The most important thing is that they stayed here. They could have gone to Guatemala or Mexico."

Whirlpool is one of the area's key companies in the appliance industry with 1,500 employees at its Cleveland plant and another 600 working at a call center here. GE Roper, which makes GE ovens and stoves in LaFayette, Ga., employs more than 1,500 workers. Burner Systems International has several hundred people making gas burner systems in Chattanooga.

Business at the Whirlpool facility in Cleveland is steadily improving as the housing market regains momentum after the recession, said Dicky Walters, who heads the $200 million plant that replaced an aging hodgepodge of buildings for sale not far away. "Volume is growing each year over the last few years," he said. "We're hiring."

Walters said the plant is bringing on between 70 to 90 employees a month, including many hired to replace workers who leave.

Walters said there's still room to grow with the plant operating at only about two-thirds of capacity.

"We're tied to housing," he said about the 1.4 million-square-foot plant that's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Gold-certified.

In addition to the plant and call center, Whirlpool operates a Knoxville customer support facility with between 200 and 300 workers, Walters said. Tennessee has the second biggest presence of Whirlpool workers nationwide behind Ohio, which has five plants, he said.

Cleveland Mayor Tom Rowland said officials worked a long time to help Whirlpool decide to build the factory. Whirlpool's predecessor appliance plants, including Maytag and Magic Chef, reach back more than 100 years in the city.

"We're glad the jobs are here," Rowland said.

City Councilman Charlie McKenzie said manufacturing is "a big deal" in Cleveland, and Whirlpool does much for the city.

"We need the jobs," he said.

Lorton, who retired from Maytag in 1996 after about 40 years in the business, formerly headed the Cleveland plant. The biggest change he has seen is the use of automation and robots in the production of stoves and ovens.

"It started out [helping] in the dirty jobs," he said, calling Whirlpool's use of robots "state of the art."

While the plant already has industrial robots, earlier this year it started using a so-called "collaborative robot."

Nicknamed "Coco," the robot is used on an assembly line without fencing and can work around humans by reacting when people enter its space.

At the plant, the robot was applying glue as a seal to stove top after stove top. According to Whirlpool, it may be the only collaborative robot in use in Cleveland.

Walters said that manufacturing today "is not our grandfather's manufacturing."

"There have been a lot of huge improvements and technological changes. Manufacturing is a big deal in the country. It's a big deal in the community. It's a big deal in Cleveland."

In Cleveland, Whirlpool produces premium ranges, wall ovens and cooktops under its own brand and others such as Maytag, KitchenAid, Jenn-Air, Amana and Ikea.

Walters said Whirlpool is the only major American-based producer of appliances.

In June, General Electric closed on a deal to sell its appliance division to Chinese manufacturer Haier for $5.6 billion, including the LaFayette, Ga., facility.

Haier, based in Qingdao, China, already is a major appliance maker worldwide, but the company only held 1.1 percent of the U.S. appliance market. GE Appliances held nearly 14 percent of the same market. Haier now has 12,000 employees who produce appliances out of Louisville, Ky., and facilities in Indiana, Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee.

Also in June, Burner Systems International came under the ownership of Illinois-based Robertshaw, a global designer and manufacturer of commercial and residential appliances. The sale price wasn't announced for BSI, which was started in 1960 and owned for the past four years by the New York equity firm of Aterian Investment Partners. The purchase was the first for Robertshaw as a private company.

Contact Mike Pare at mpare@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6318.