Factory Man : How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local - and Helped Save an American Town (9780316322607) Read online

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  For all the world’s factory workers, past and present, and especially for my long-ago factory mom, Sarah Macy Slack, whose airplane lights I still imagine I can glimpse, up among the stars

  Black cat, white cat, all that matters is that it catches mice.

  —TENG HSIAO-P’ING

  PROLOGUE

  The Dusty Road to Dalian

  John D. Bassett III was snaking his way through the sooty streets of rural northern China on a three-day fact-finding mission. It was 2002, and the third-generation Virginia furniture maker was gathering ammunition for an epic battle to keep the sawdust in his factory flying. He was close to the border of North Korea, on the hunt for a dresser built in the style of a nineteenth-century French monarch. If he could find the man who’d made that damn Louis Philippe, he might just save his business.

  Back at Vaughan-Bassett, his factory in Galax, line workers had already deconstructed the dresser piece by piece and proved that the one hundred dollars the Chinese were wholesaling it for was far less than the cost of the materials—a violation of World Trade Organization laws. The sticker on the back read Dalian, China, and now here he was, some eight thousand miles away from his Blue Ridge Mountains, trying to pinpoint the source of the cheap chest of drawers.

  It was November and snowy. The car creaked with every icy pothole it hit.

  Word had already reached him through a friendly translator a few months earlier: There was a factory owner in the hinterlands, a hundred miles outside of Dalian, who’d been bragging that he was going to bring the Bassett furniture family down.

  If they were going to war, Bassett told his son Wyatt, their family needed to heed Napoleon’s advice: Know your enemy.

  Today, for once in his life, JBIII sat silent. The car lurched along northward, farther into the remote province of Liaoning.

  The first time John Bassett visited an Asian factory was in 1984, and it was only after dinner and way too many drinks that an elderly factory owner in Taiwan revealed his real opinion of American business leaders. The man was so candid that at first, his own interpreter clammed up, refusing to translate his words.

  The Taiwanese businessman had negotiated plenty of deals with Europeans and South Americans, but he’d never met people quite like the Americans.

  What do you mean? JBIII pressed.

  I have figured you guys out, the translator finally relayed.

  Tell me.

  If the price is right, you will do anything. We have never seen people before who are this greedy—or this naive.

  The Americans were not only knocking one another over in a stampede to import the cheapest furniture they could but they were also ignoring the fact that they were jeopardizing their own factories back home by teaching their Asian competitors every nuance of the American furniture-making trade.

  When we get on top, the man said, don’t expect us to be dumb enough to do for you what you’ve been dumb enough to do for us.

  It would take many more trips to Asia before it became clear to JBIII what the Taiwanese furniture maker meant. During that time, two events helped ensure China would indeed get on top: China’s admission into the WTO, and the great exodus of 160 million rural Chinese to the cities—the largest migration in human history.

  It would take the hundred-dollar dresser and getting eyeball-to-eyeball with the man behind it before JBIII fully understood the battle he was about to enter. The rules of war had changed—drastically—and cowboy capitalism seemed to be the only rule of international trade.

  It was cold inside the factory where Bassett finally met with businessman and Communist Party official He YunFeng in northern China in November 2002. The workers’ breath froze in little puffs of vapor. The Chinese furniture magnate looked him “in the damn eye,” Bassett recalled. Then he said something that raised the hair on the back of the Virginian’s neck.

  He YunFeng would be happy to provide Bassett with the dressers at a fraction of what they cost to make, a feat Bassett knew would not be possible without Chinese government subsidies. All Bassett had to do in return, He YunFeng said, was close his own factories.

  Close his factories? John Bassett pictured the whole lot of his hard-charging forebears turning en masse in their graves. He thought of his 1,730 workers—plainspoken mountain types, many of whom had followed their parents and grandparents into the factories—standing in unemployment lines instead of assembly lines. He thought of the smokestacks that for a century had borne his family’s name and of the legacy he wanted to leave his kids.

  Back at home, he felt alone in the industry, with only his two sons and his scrappy little factories. He was the last American furniture maker willing to raise hell about what was happening. If he could prove the Chinese were selling the product below the cost of the materials, if he could prove their factories were buoyed by Communist government subsidies in an illegal price dump designed to drive American companies out of business, then his company just might survive. If he could convince a majority of his industry to join him in persuading the U.S. Department of Commerce and the U.S. International Trade Commission of the truth, maybe the entire industry could be saved.

  But those were big ifs, with potentially huge pitfalls. Surely he would be scorned by both his longtime customers and his competitors. He’d be ridiculed by the handful of families that had ruled the fifty-billion-dollar industry, as well as some members of his own family, who were too busy closing down factories—and cashing their checks—to protect their furniture-making legacy.

  He’d be ostracized for trying to stop the flood of furniture jobs from America, for striking back against the one-percenters who were about to move damn near all their plants to Asia and tear the heart out of the Blue Ridge region he loved.

  From the taverns of Virginia to the halls of power in Washington, DC; from the factory floor to the back roads of Liaoning, China, where he would uncover a great lie at the heart of globalization, John Bassett was going to war.

  PART I

  1

  The Tipoff

  What were all them little people doing at work today?

  —BASSETT FURNITURE LINE WORKER ON THE PRESENCE OF TAIWANESE FACTORY MANAGERS

  Once in a reporter’s career, if one is very lucky, a person like John D. Bassett III comes along. JBIII is inspirational. He’s brash. He’s a sawdust-covered good old boy from rural Virginia, a larger-than-life rule breaker who for more than a decade has stood almost single-handedly against the outflow of furniture jobs from America.

  “He’s an asshole!” more than one of his competitors barked when they heard I was writing a book about globalization with JBIII as a main character. Over the course of researching this book, over the course of hearing his many lectures and listening to him evade my questions by telling me the same stories over and over, there were times that I agreed.

  I first heard about him
in Rocky Mount, Virginia, about half an hour from my home in Roanoke, while eating breakfast with my neighbor and good friend Joel Shepherd. Joel owns Virginia Furniture Market, a Rocky Mount retail establishment that began thriving at the same time the import boom hit. Right now as I type, I’m sitting in a paisley recliner that my husband and I still fight over because it’s the comfiest seat in our 1926 American foursquare. I remember Joel showing it to me in his store, rocking it back and forth. Despite what I might have heard about made-in-China furniture, he told me, a swarm of high-school wrestlers could pin one another on this chair and it would not fall apart. With the friendly-neighbor discount, I bought it for a hundred and sixty bucks.

  I had invited Joel to breakfast to pick his brain. I was working on a Roanoke Times series on the impact of globalization on southwest Virginia’s company towns, articles inspired by the work of freelance photographer Jared Soares, who’d been making the hourlong trek from Roanoke to Martinsville three times a week for more than a year. His photos were gritty and moving: church services and tattoo artists; a textile-plant conveyor belt converted for use in a food bank; a disabled minister named Leonard whiling away the time in his kitchen in the middle of the afternoon. The people of Martinsville and Henry County, Virginia, were refreshingly open about what had happened to them, Jared told me, and he’d long wondered why our newspaper didn’t do more to document the effects of globalization in our mountainous corner of the world.

  Not that many other media outlets had done any better. According to a 2009 Pew Research Center survey, the gravest economic crisis since the Great Depression was largely being covered from the top down, primarily from the perspective of big business and the Obama administration. The percentage of economy stories that featured ordinary people and displaced workers? Just 2 percent. If the people of Henry County wanted their stories to be heard, Jared and I were going to have to help.

  It would be up to writers and photographers like us to paint the long-view picture of what had happened when, one after another, the textile and then the furniture factories closed and set up shop instead in Mexico, China, and Vietnam, where workers were paid a fraction of what the American laborers were earning. In the Henry County region alone, some twenty thousand people had lost their jobs.

  In the early 1960s, Martinsville was Virginia’s manufacturing powerhouse, known for being home to more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in the country. But by 2009, one-fifth of the town’s labor force was unemployed, and many of the millionaires had fled for cheerier landscapes. Henry County was now the capital of long-term unemployment, with Virginia’s highest rate for nine of the past eleven years.

  A week before my breakfast with Joel, an empty Bassett Furniture plant had burned to the ground. Police arrested Silas Crane, a thirty-four-year-old Henry County man who’d been trying to salvage the factory’s copper electrical casings to sell on the black market but instead had sparked an electrical fire. His burns were visible in his police mug shot. I’d heard many similar stories, as some of the desperate moved from the unemployment rolls to the crime rosters. A stranger approached one woman I know outside a CVS pharmacy and offered her a hundred dollars if she’d sign for the purchase of the cold medicine pseudoephedrine—the main ingredient used to make methamphetamine.

  Most people, though, were scraping by in legal ways—babysitting, growing their own food, working part-time at Walmart. The director of an area food bank told me that he could divine what people used to do for work by their disfigurements: The women who’d been bent over sewing machines all day making sweatshirts had humps on their backs. The men who culled lumber were missing fingers. “We’re the last, last, last resort, to come stand in line and get a box of old food,” he said.

  But, Joel explained, there was this feisty old man in Galax, a small town about seventy miles away from Rocky Mount, who’d managed to buck the trend. He was from the family that had once run the largest furniture-making operation in the world, Bassett Furniture Industries. His name was John D. Bassett III, and, yes, he was from that Bassett family—the name inscribed on the back of so many American headboards and dressers; the name often stamped on the bedroom suite behind door number three on Let’s Make a Deal. The story of how he fought against the tides of globalization was full of legal cunning, political intrigue, and, judging from what Joel told me about Bassett’s Asian competitors, some serious cowboy grit.

  As Joel explained over a plate of sausage biscuits and gravy that morning, imitating the patriarch’s booming voice and cringe-inducing chutzpah: “The ‘fucking Chi-Comms’ were not going to tell him how to make furniture!”

  But there was another, even juicier element to the story. John Bassett was no longer living in the eponymous company town of Bassett, Virginia. He’d been booted out of his family’s business by a domineering relative. Three decades later, the family squabble turned corporate coup still had local tongues wagging with talk of a living-room fight scene (some say it was the front porch), a rescue-squad call, and, my favorite detail: John Bassett tipping the ambulance driver a hundred bucks not to tell anybody that he’d had his battered brother-in-law hauled away, like something out of Dynasty.

  But was any of it true? And what did the family infighting have to do with John Bassett giving the middle finger to the lure of easy money overseas?

  Plenty, it would turn out. But peeling that onion would take me more than a year. It would have me burning up U.S. Route 58, the curvy mountain road that meanders through the former company towns just north of the Virginia–North Carolina line, where it hits you why the people of Henry County have come to call what happened “the 58 virus.”

  It would send me across the Blue Ridge to John Bassett’s billowing smokestacks in Galax; to the International Home Furnishings Market in High Point, North Carolina, to meet a crop of young MBAs and marketing execs in their skinny suits and aggressive glasses; and, on the advice of laid-off Stanley Furniture worker Wanda Perdue, to Surabaya, Indonesia, where much of the world’s wooden bedroom furniture is now made.

  I first met Wanda in early 2012 outside a community college computer lab, where she came for regular tutoring in math. She was fifty-eight years old, cobbling together a living by working part-time at Walmart and hoping to land a full-time position as soon as she got her associate’s degree in office administration. Her one splurge was buying Luck’s pinto beans, the only non-store-brand food she allowed herself.

  The farthest she’d been from home was a trip to Myrtle Beach she’d taken three years before. It was her first time seeing the ocean—at the age of fifty-five.

  “I want you to see what they do in Indonesia and explain to me why we can’t do that here no more,” she said.

  Fair enough, I thought.

  Joel and I were sitting in a landscape of rusted silos and vacant factories. Weeds sprouted through cracks in empty parking lots. Across the street from us was the shell of Lane Furniture, another defunct furniture maker that, like Stanley, had family connections to Bassett. In the 1920s, Edward Lane pushed the notion that every teenage girl in America needed to store her trousseau in a hope chest made of protective cedarwood, a safe place to keep her hopes and household accessories until she landed the man of her dreams. By the time soldiers returned from World War II, the cedar chest was ubiquitous, a must-have in the starter kit for a suburban home. “It’s the Real Love-Gift,” Say America’s Most Romantic Sweethearts, proclaimed a 1948 ad featuring Audie Murphy, the decorated combat soldier and movie star.

  Joel pointed to the silk mills where his aunts had once worked, now closed, every one of them: the victims of what economists call “creative destruction.” The lost jobs and vanishing industries that resulted from the ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 and China’s joining the World Trade Organization in 2001 were necessary outcomes, the theory goes. Over time, society becomes richer and more productive, and citizens across the globe benefit from higher living standards.

  Thoma
s L. Friedman devotes nearly all 639 pages of The World Is Flat to the benefits of globalization, noting that it saved American consumers roughly $600 billion, extended more capital to businesses to invest in new innovations, and helped the Federal Reserve hold interest rates down, which in turn gave Americans a chance to buy or refinance homes.

  Or as Joel put it, reminding me of my hundred-and-sixty-dollar recliner: “We’ve all enjoyed the benefits of falling prices. A person can get far more value for [her] furniture dollar now than she could thirty years ago.” Not to mention that globalization has improved the standard of living among factory workers in China, Vietnam, and Indonesia, people who used to toil in rice paddies and farm fields.

  The car put the carriage makers out of work, just like the Internet hurt mail carriers and many of my own newspaper colleagues—one of the reasons my newspaper shrank its core coverage area and no longer has a Henry County beat.

  But as the daughter of a displaced factory worker, I wondered about the dinghies being sunk by globalization’s rising tide. I questioned why the unemployment stories rarely quoted the displaced workers or mentioned the fact that many folks in the corporate offices had simply switched jobs from factory bosses to global-sourcing managers. They were still there, still fabulously employed, some hauling in seven-figure salaries. When the big guys weren’t off traveling the globe, their cars were among the few left in the company parking lots.

  In small towns across America, the front-page stories about escalating drug crime and lower test scores seemed somehow linked to the page 3 briefs on deaths in faraway garment factories. But that connection was hard to define—and even harder to report on—given the complex Spirograph of interlooping supply chains, impotent regulators, and press-avoiding CEOs.