In your home here in SE Vermont, do you have a stretch cord with hooks on either end to hold a bundle of things together or maybe stretch swimwear stored away for summer? Or maybe a Covid mask, diapers with stretch fasteners for baby, a box of stretchable bandages in the bathroom cabinet, athletic shorts? If so, you know something about what Lisa Breault, one of roughly eighty employees at the Fulflex plant at the north end of Brattleboro, does. They make, she makes and is part of the manufacturing process to make stretchy, elasticized threads which they ship to the makers of all the above products and an endless list of others, worldwide.
Fulflex has two US manufacturing plants: at the north end of Brattleboro and Texas. They also have offices in Miami and further afield in Luxembourg, India and Columbia along with warehouses located around the world. In Brattleboro, roughly 75% of what they manufacture is for US manufacturers, 25% for Europe and Asia. They manufacture and export stretch thread to meet custom orders for elasticized threads 1,000 feet long and from .007th of an inch up to 54 inches.
She started working in the Fulflex plant in 2001. The plant was humming along, but when Covid struck in 2020, a lot changed. Lisa, the subject of this profile, and all 80 of her coworkers at Fulflex were designated “essential workers” by the US government. Among many elasticized threads, they manufacture the stretchable parts crucial to the manufacture of Covid masks made by other companies. That employee-designation of “essential” lasted for two years. Lisa told me “That meant we had to work six days a week for two years plus. One day, just after Covid started, I said over lunch, ‘I bet one of us in this plant will get Covid. The next day I was the one who had it!’ ”
Lisa’s story itself takes her halfway around the world. She was born in Thailand in 1975. Her father, Joseph Beebe from Brattleboro, had enlisted in the Air Force from 1967 to 1976. He served in Viet Nam and was later stationed in Thailand where he met and married Wacharee. They later moved back to Brattleboro in 1976. Soonafter she received a Certificate of Being Born Abroad.
She graduated from BUHS in 1993 later married Tom Breault and they now live in Hinsdale with their two children. As a high school graduate, she took a job with Geka Brush off Exit 1 for eight years, then for Georgia Pacific down by the Connecticut River as a machine operator making napkins for Burger King and MacDonalds: “It was a kinda neat job. I fed huge rolls of paper into a massive machine that embossed, folded and packaged the napkins. We forget when we go to MacDonald’s that someone has to make the napkins we use there.” Then in 2001 she left to start work at Fulflex. “Now, I, along with roughly 50 others here at Fulflex work first shift from 7:00 – 3:00. ( Second shift from 3:00 – 11:00 for 15 people; third shift from 11:00 – 7:00 for about 15 people, roughly 50% women, 50% men.) And this includes every-other Saturday for everyone.)
Along the way, Lisa married married Tom Breault.Tom currently works for Warner Brothers, a paving company in Massachusetts.
In earlier profiles, I often described the actual work being done by the person I’m profiling as well as – in some cases – the machinery they operate. With Lisa’s, that is simply beyond me. I’ll try to simplify: In the northern third of the plant huge rubber cubes 4’-5’ on all sides are melted down and mixed with various materials and then rolled into 6’-8’elasticized sheets of stretchable fabric around 1,000 feet long and very thin – some part of an inch depending on the order. Each roll is manufactured to highly specific requirements as to elasticity, thickness, finish, talc coating or not, from orders that come in from other manufacturers around the world.
These HUGE rolls weighing 600-800 lbs. are then transported to the north end of the southern two-thirds of this manufacturing plant. There the rolls are cut in Primary Splitting into smaller strips, spliced together and sent on for further processing: This part of the operation enables the operators, perhaps Lisa being one of them, to run “slitter machines that can cut the roughly 7 inch to 13.5” wide sheets into anywhere from a fraction to an inch to perhaps 1 ½” wide strips. Lisa might work in one area one day, in another a different day.
The larger rolls can be sliced into different width rolls. A 4 foot wide roll, for example, yet still 1,000 feet long, is something that Lisa is working on at the moment. She sends these 1,000 rolls through this “slitter machine” that she sets to cut the 4’ wide, 1,000’ rolls into strips anywhere from a faction of an inch to perhaps a 1 ½” wide for use in bandages or bathing suit straps or…... These strips will be woven into let’s say swimsuits by swimsuit manufacturers to introduce elasticity into whatever the final product might be. Each of these individual 1,000’ rolls of tape of a specific width is gathered into its own upright cardboard box for shipment to the manufacturer that ordered it. Needless to say, this is VERY precise work.
Lisa told me “I was known for awhile as the diaper elastic maker, for example, until manufacturers in India took over that niche in the market. Now I often work slitting elastic into 1” – 2” wide elastic strips that the customer will weave into swimsuits or…. I work with Clint, Keith, Justine, Laurie, Lynn, Jade…. I like what I do and I like working with the others. The work is hard but comfortable – though we all wear sound protection - the job pays well, and we all work well together and we all pay very close attention to safety. The previous “no-accident record” in this plant was 603 days.
“And we all pay close attention to what we call Ergonomic back safety principles as many of us lift a lot of weight. And I just realized every job I have had since I started working full time has required me to wear steel-toed shoes.”
This is one of a series of some 30 profiles of working people from southern Vermont and adjacent New Hampshire that I wrote and then published in the Brattleboro Reformer newspaper every Friday from Jan 1 - May 30. Do the same with your local newspaper.