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

by Macy, Beth

  “This is the town where you can joke about unemployment,” the series began. “A restaurant man needs some counter help. ‘What we need around here,’ he says, ‘is some unemployment.’ ”

  By the time I arrived in 2012, almost half a century later, the region that had once boasted 42,560 jobs now had just 24,733. Nearly half the workforce had been axed by globalization. While most of the vanished jobs had been related to furniture or textiles, gone with those factories were dozens of diners, industry suppliers, and mom-and-pop shops. Replacements tended to come in the form of Dollar Trees, Family Dollars, and check-cashing stores. Worse, sometimes there were no replacements at all, just empty storefronts. The unemployment rate was by far the state’s highest, hovering between 15 and 20 percent. One in three families in Martinsville received food stamps, and three of every four public-school students qualified to receive free or reduced-rate lunches. No one was joking about unemployment now.

  But the reality of displacement cannot be conveyed with simple numbers. There are some life-affirming success stories among the rolls of the laid-off, to be sure. Few are more inspiring than the eighth-grade dropout who spent twenty-three years doing piecework in a textile mill and then went to college after she was laid off. And she kept on going to college—until she had settled herself and her family firmly in the middle class. In a decade, Kay Pagans went from not knowing how to turn a computer on to teaching technology classes.

  Buoyed by TAA retraining funds, waitressing work, and a husband with a steady paycheck, she went to Patrick Henry Community College when Bassett-Walker Knitting (then called VF Knitwear) closed in 1999. By the time she was fifty-five, she was a professor there whose job was to mentor displaced workers, teaching them to use computers, helping with remedial math, and generally holding their hands. “I tell my story because I think it’s important for them to see that there is life after death,” she told me. “But they’re scared. They’re absolutely petrified.

  “There are some people who are not capable of doing what I did, whether it’s a mental block or maybe the math. What do you do with those people beyond saying, ‘Everybody’s gonna go to college and get a better job,’ especially when there aren’t many jobs to retrain for?”

  Pagans is an outlier, having made her higher-education strides at a time when college access for poor people was diminishing at record rates—and that was before the start of the worst recession since the Depression. “I was going to college at age forty, and I was petrified,” she said. “But I knew it was now or never, my one chance to do something different.”

  The large majority of dislocated workers don’t take advantage of the federally funded programs Pagans used to educate herself. When I asked several why, most of them cited the TAA clause requiring them to attend school full-time—a foreign concept to people who joined assembly lines the moment they turned eighteen, have mortgages to pay, and have neither the confidence nor the math skills that remaking oneself requires.

  Whither those long-term unemployed? That was the question that had first sent me and my photographer friend Jared Soares to Martinsville, and trying to answer it felt a lot like trying to bottle smoke. You can interview people at one of the state’s workforce development centers, but that’s only a snapshot of who’s applying for unemployment or TAA benefits on a particular day, and it doesn’t take into account the growing ranks of people on disability. The people who’ve stopped looking for work aren’t at the workforce centers either, nor are the people whose benefits expired long ago. Also missing are the legions who have ephemeral jobs they drive to outside the area, which now account for nearly half the region’s 25,414-person workforce.

  The ones who had money to relocate have mostly already gone—the DuPont chemists and accountants, the midlevel factory supervisors. The remaining population is smaller, poorer, grayer, and more diverse. For the first time in Martinsville’s history, the 2010 census recorded more blacks and Hispanics than whites.

  There’s no one place to see the satellite view of displacement because, as Columbia University psychiatrist Mindy Fullilove explained, laid-off workers are, by definition, displaced. “When a factory closes, networks become fractured, and people can’t find each other,” Fullilove said. “Their old methods of communicating have disappeared.”

  People seem to disappear, like scrap lumber tossed into a factory hog.

  Remember the moment in The Wizard of Oz when the film turns from black-and-white to Technicolor? There were days when it felt like I was watching that process—in reverse. During my nearly two years of reporting this story, first for my newspaper series and then for this book, I tried to capture a sense of what used to be and what remains by walking around—sometimes without seeing another soul—and by driving.

  I rode with a variety of people, from politicians to ministers to activists; from teenagers to retirees. I took notes while Henry County assistant prosecutor Wayne Withers drove my car, pointing out churches where copper pipes had been ripped out and homes where burglars were caught stealing opiates and antianxiety drugs.

  We drove past sad old strip malls and parking lots riddled with weeds, vacant except for a guy hawking sports jerseys from the trunk of his car. We drove by the abandoned call center that was supposed to reemploy hundreds of the displaced workers and did so, beginning in 2004—before it shut down, eight years later, and moved offshore to the Philippines.

  “I see a lot of people in court now for fighting with their wives,” Withers said. “People who were middle class before they lost their jobs. I didn’t used to see that.”

  In the warm months, I saw yard sales, one after another, some tucked into snaky corners of rural back roads. “People’s taking their furniture and just putting it on their front lawns, deciding between eating, paying their light bill, or getting their medicine,” a retiree, Mary Thomas, told me.

  Then there were the feel-good tours, the admonishments for me to be positive, to keep my journalism light. “Don’t make it sound like we have tumbleweeds rolling through downtown,” Martinsville mayor Kim Adkins pleaded. And yet when I asked her to estimate what she believed to be the actual unemployment rate—counting both official unemployment enrollees and those whose benefits had long since expired—without hesitating, she said one-third.

  Allyson Rothrock purposely avoided the depressing parts as she drove me around the region in her Volvo station wagon. The director of a community foundation called Harvest, created in 2002 with the $152 million sale of Martinsville’s public hospital, she insisted the area had to move beyond its past in order to flourish again. But few people were immune to the effects of the current economy, she conceded, her eyes welling with tears as she recalled her husband’s layoff from his job as a factory middle manager—and their subsequent divorce. People were so stressed that the owner of a small business approached her in the office parking lot in tears one night, begging for a loan so he could make payroll.

  Harvest had pumped millions into raising high-school-graduation rates, boosting college attendance, and bumping up tourism—all designed to buttress the most important goal of all, luring in new business, preferably high-tech or high-skilled manufacturing. Rob Spilman was personally organizing funding for community college interns to learn to operate Bassett’s computerized machinery. “We don’t need guys to run Google around here, but we need capable, competent people,” he said.

  Rothrock drove me to several Harvest-sponsored projects, including a nine-million-dollar state-of-the-art soccer complex; the region’s first baccalaureate-offering college, the New College Institute; and a gleaming greenway along the Smith River with bike-borrowing stations and kayak put-ins.

  “You can’t move the river to China!” she exclaimed.

  There was a palpable, almost raging disconnect between the happy and employed tour guides and the unemployed people I found on my own, many of whom saw Harvest as an instrument of the well-to-do, an extension of the same executives who had shut the factories down. Many of th
e laid-off people were reluctant to talk to me. Some canceled appointments for interviews, nervous that being quoted in the newspaper might keep them from being called in for an interview or would endanger the part-time jobs they were lucky to have.

  One whispered that she supplemented her unemployment checks by taking in a boarder and baking cakes—her sister took the cakes to work to sell by the slice—but she worried her benefits would be reduced if I used her name. A credit union manager who was replaced by an ATM when her branch closed in 2011 was now running a consignment store downtown. After the layoff, she grieved harder than she did when her forty-seven-year-old husband died of a heart attack, six years before. “Because I knew that an organization was in control of my layoff. Whereas with my husband, that was at least God’s doing,” she said.

  The first couple of times I asked John Bassett to meet me in his namesake town, he refused, saying he feared I’d make it appear that he was gloating about his hometown’s demise. Was I the snake he needed to kill and stretch out to see how long and dangerous I was?

  We sparred nearly every time we spoke. One observer, listening to the verbal ping-pong, nervously asked us if we’d still be speaking by the time the book was published. It was a fair question.

  “Don’t worry, we do this all the time,” he said.

  I’d wanted a tour of John Bassett’s Bassett—the barbershop where he’d gotten his first haircut, the storefront cubicle where his brother-in-law had demoted him, the plethora of smokestacks (a few still there, others only a memory) that bore his family’s name. I’d seen it myself many times, but now I hoped to see the outcome of globalization through his eyes, to understand what he felt as he remembered Bassett’s more prosperous days.

  In June 2012, he finally agreed (as long as I agreed not to take pictures). We met in the parking lot that was once part of his grandfather’s legacy, the First National Bank of Bassett. Now a Wells Fargo branch, the square brick building sits in the shadow of the Bassett Furniture headquarters, home to the only parking lot in town that’s still full of cars.

  At the time, Bassett CEO Rob Spilman wasn’t talking to me. (This was months before he’d consented to two long interviews and several phone and e-mail fact-checking sessions.) My March 2012 Harvest story had explored how the foundation had become a flashpoint for long-simmering racial tensions; how it had built a soccer complex in a white community and then, after the recession hit, reneged on its promise to build a basketball arena in the historically black district. “The Harvest Foundation is entwined with the good old boys like roots around a pipe,” local NAACP president Naomi Hodge-Muse had said.

  Critics argued that Harvest ignored the plight of those hit hardest by the shuttered factories. They also believed it was infected with old-money cronyism—as evidenced by the fact that Rob Spilman was now chairman of the Harvest-funded New College Institute board. (Spilman has since directed Bassett Furniture’s foundation to donate $200,000 toward a new NCI building that will house programs in advanced manufacturing, health care, and entrepreneurship.)

  “We are never going to be exactly like we once were, but we’re rebuilding now with Harvest and NCI,” Rob had said at the time. “And it doesn’t do us any good to cry in our beer.”

  I’m certain he didn’t intend to sound cruel. But he seemed to have no idea how that statement might come across to people who were still suffering, still looking for work. It was not unlike being deaf to the demands of students at a college for the hearing-impaired.

  “Cry in our beer?” shouted Lisa Setliff, a laid-off Stanley Furniture worker turned community college student. “I want to tell him, you’re lucky you’ve got beer to cry in!”

  It was a muggy June morning in the Appalachian foothills. JBIII and I began our tour by leaving the Smith River and driving into the kudzu-covered hills. The meandering country route eventually landed us atop a hill at the Bassett family cemetery.

  If the living Bassetts wouldn’t talk to me, we would start with the dead.

  JBIII parked his Lexus at the bottom of the cemetery drive. We stepped around the barricade that blocked the road, walked past the No Trespassing sign, and made our way up the steep private road. Under a canopy of lichen-covered oaks and Virginia hardwoods, we first paid our respects at the cemetery centerpiece: J.D. Bassett’s marble mausoleum, adorned with a simple stained-glass cross.

  When we reached the top of the mausoleum steps, the doors swung open easily.

  It was time, finally, to meet the misters—J.D. and his brother C.C.; their respective sons, W.M. and Ed. Their coffins had been stacked, along with their wives’, in separate burial vaults. Descendants and distant relatives encircled them, some housed in a second mausoleum that was built after the first one had filled. In the grass along the periphery stood the markers of long-ago line workers whose families had lacked burial plots as well as the money to buy them, whereupon Mr. J.D. had kindly said, Sure, put them here.

  Birds chirped and trilled. JBIII was limping a bit, having had foot surgery a few months before at New York’s Hospital for Special Surgery, the country’s number one orthopedics hospital and the place where people like A-Rod go when they need better bones.

  “You see?” he says, stretching his arms out with a half smile. “You came up here and you were still under the smokestacks of Bassett.”

  Until, one by one, those smokestacks fell.

  “You wanna see what happens to industrial America when you don’t do what you’re supposed to do?” John Bassett asked, then told me to turn my recorder off.

  It’s a sentiment he repeated throughout the tour as he alternated between anger, sadness, and an uneasy understanding of the choices his relatives made; between holding his tongue and saying what he really thought.

  “It was gut-wrenching for everyone,” he told me for maybe the thirty-fourth time, and finally I got what he was saying: He might have won the battle to keep his Galax factory chugging along, but this hometown tour was painful. “You have to remember, I haven’t driven through these streets in fifteen years,” he said.

  Mr. J.D.’s Victorian home had been razed long ago; C.C.’s home (occupied later by his son, Mr. Ed) was still standing, but it was in such disrepair that the man who lives there now called it a money pit and said his family could barely afford to heat it. (We met a year later when he and his sons were fixing the brick wall at the end of the driveway, not far from the cement stairs that had carried the cofounder from his hilltop mansion to work. The wall had been smashed by a drunk driver who’d slammed into it—in a stolen car.)

  On the outskirts of Bassett, John and I stopped at the home he and Pat lived in when their kids were small, checked out the gardens (now overgrown) and the barns where he kept Cindy and Jill, the grouse-hunting dogs. “This house used to be so beautiful,” he said of the four-bedroom, four-bath white-brick home. They had named it Riverside, set as it was on twenty-four acres that abutted the Smith.

  But now rusted gutters hung askew, and a volunteer locust sapling sprouted from a mossy-tiled roof. It was unclear if the house was abandoned or if the people who lived here just couldn’t afford to keep it up.

  Driving through the center of town, he tried to bring alive the place he once knew—he pointed out where the hotels and boardinghouses had been, the diners and the retail stores, the movie theaters where blacks once had to sit upstairs.

  Across from a shuttered Bassett outlet store, we paused to look at a large rectangle of manicured grass with a chain-link fence surrounding its perimeter. It was sterile, newly erected, and downright jarring in its perfection.

  Rob Spilman had been tasked with leveling the original Bassett Furniture factory, aka Old Town, years after his father had closed it, in 1989, and it was Rob who ordered the creation of the manicured grass where Old Town once stood.

  “It’s a community improvement gesture,” his cousin Jeb Bassett, a company vice president, told the Martinsville Bulletin when the factory was demolished in 2009. “It’s not very moti
vating to come to work every day and look at the remains of a partially demolished factory.”

  Down the road at J.D. plants Nos. 1 and 2, the first factories John Bassett ran, subcontractors wearing HAZMAT suits were cleaning up arson rubbish with shovels and backhoes—pushing bricks into piles, dumping piles into refuse containers. A few weeks before our tour, Silas Crane, thirty-four, was sentenced to prison for accidentally setting it on fire while stealing copper wires. The fire destroyed not only much of the abandoned factory but also hundreds of thousands of dollars in charity goods that were being housed there by a nonprofit.

  A subcontractor hauling away the debris told us we were on private property, and trespassing was not permitted.

  “I ran this plant for twenty-five years,” John argued.

  But the worker shook his head and pointed to the road, and we left as directed without saying another word.

  Some companies handled the closings with more sensitivity than others. As we drove past Martinsville’s Hooker Furniture, which closed its flagship plant in 2007, I described my interview with fifty-one-year-old Lane Nunley, who was Hooker’s sample man for fourteen years, the man responsible for turning the designers’ drawings into wood. I told John about the pride Lane took in his work, how he’d recalled former chairman Clyde Hooker Jr. calling every employee by name and the way the old man tearfully looked each worker in the eye the day he closed the Martinsville plant.

  “It was devastating. It was almost like going to a funeral for everyone you knew,” Lane had said. “But Hooker was fair to us. They always did treat you like you meant something to ’em.”

  As a tribute to the employees, the high-end furniture maker had even let North Carolina filmmaker Matt Barr document the final shipment of furniture made in the plant for a documentary called With These Hands. When it premiered, in 2008, hundreds of former workers turned out to watch it. They even presented Clyde Hooker, by then retired, with a refurbished factory steam whistle.