by Macy, Beth
Hooker had been a seven-year-old boy when his father built the plant in 1927, with Bassett family backing, and the day the factory opened, young Clyde got to blow the steam whistle heralding the very first shift.
“There was a standing ovation, and people were crying,” Matt Barr told me. “I don’t think they held the closing against him, because he had always treated them so well. They understood he wasn’t the bad guy; globalization was the bad guy.”
CEO Paul Toms, Clyde Hooker’s nephew, acknowledged the workers’ pain, telling the filmmakers, “I feel like we’ve let folks down.”
Nunley had made eighteen dollars an hour at Hooker, plus benefits and profit-sharing. His work was so meticulous that a headhunter representing a Chinese factory had offered him a training job overseas. (“Training my friends’ replacements? No way,” Lane told the man.) By the time I met him, in 2012, he had used TAA funds to earn a certificate in auto-body repair.
Now he worked in Stoneville, North Carolina, where he earned nine dollars an hour and didn’t have health insurance. “I haven’t been to the doctor in three years,” he said. “If I get the flu or something, I ride it out and use home remedies instead.”
When Nunley was between jobs, he’d worked briefly for American of Martinsville, a hotel-and-motel-furniture maker that closed without warning in 2010, eventually filing for bankruptcy. Most employees didn’t know about the closing until they arrived at work on Monday morning to find the doors locked and only a security guard to deliver the news. Many of the 228 laid-off workers also lost weeks of vacation pay they were owed.
John pulled into the American of Martinsville parking lot, where we were greeted by an ironic antique: a crooked sign telling long-gone job seekers where to drop off their applications. John Bassett sighed.
“It’s depressing when you think about what was and what is,” he said. “We had to close a lot of factories. I’ve closed some factories myself.” The moment felt rare—uncurated and unguarded. And it brought forth the primary focus of JBIII:
“But we didn’t have to close ’em all.”
On our way back to my car, we passed through Fieldale, once home to the sprawling Chicago-based Fieldcrest Cannon (later Pillowtex Corporation), which operated twenty-one fabric mills across the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic. Fieldcrest towels were such a symbol of Henry County prosperity that Virginia House Speaker A.L. Philpott used to pass them out to every member of the Virginia General Assembly, adding a special light blue set for the lieutenant governor—to match his wife’s eyes.
Closed in 2003, the plant that once employed a thousand rug and towel makers was now the site of a church-based food bank, Victory International Ministries. That seemed a fitting end to our tour.
Only it wasn’t quite.
A few days later, JBIII called. He’d just talked to his relatives in Bassett, and it seemed there was a reason Mr. J.D.’s mausoleum doors were so easy to open during our tour. Neither of us had noticed anything missing, but thieves had removed every bit of brass and bronze from the factory founder’s tomb—doorknobs, vases, ornamental grillwork, window covers. Apparently, they’d tried to steal the doors too, but they were too heavy to lift.
At Stoneleigh, the mansion that former governor Bonce Stanley had built as his faux-English trophy castle, the copper downspouts had also been stolen. “So they’ve raided a cemetery, they’ve set a closed factory on fire, and they’re taking this stuff to dealers because commodities are now very high,” John told me on the phone.
“Are people bitter?” he had asked me, weeks before.
Lots of people I met were bitter, including Samuel Watkins, a sixty-year-old who’d worked at Stanley Furniture in Stanleytown as a molder operator for thirty-four years. His next job, at a Martinsville semi-custom cabinet plant called MasterBrand Cabinets, lasted ten months before the factory closed in September 2012, putting 335 out of work. I happened to run into Samuel one sultry day in August 2013, the same week the Associated Press announced new data showing that four in five American adults will face poverty during their lifetimes. It was one of the first national news articles I’d read that directly connected growing poverty to the increasingly globalized economy and the destruction of factory jobs. A month earlier, MIT professor David Autor coauthored a study pointing out more concerning statistics: that for each year low-wage American factory workers were exposed to competition from Chinese goods, their wages fell 2.6 percent more than higher-wage factory workers’, and disability rates in hard-hit towns like Martinsville were up by as much as 30 percent. “The people who argue that trade is just great for everyone, that argument is inaccurate,” Autor told me.
The brunt of globalization’s blow had clearly been borne by low-income American workers, and finally even the scholars and Washington journalists were catching on to that fact, something Samuel Watkins could have told them four years ago. He had no idea I was a journalist writing a book about the effects of globalization, but he nonetheless pulled me aside during a chance encounter and positively spilled the hurt, bitterness, and shame he’d experienced in the ranks of the unemployed. When Watkins told his caseworker at the Virginia Employment Commission he was struggling to find full-time work, “She told me to get a grip. She said I wasn’t gonna make thirteen ninety an hour no more,” he said.
“As a society, we goin’ back,” he added. His wife, a sixty-one-year-old former furniture worker, was in the process of applying for federal disability benefits. They’d already gone through their retirement nest egg, and Samuel was now mowing lawns and working as a gardener for $8.50 an hour six days a week. He had no health coverage and had recently maxed out his credit card to have an infected tooth pulled. He hauled his tools and gas around in the back of a dented 1999 Ford Explorer.
Without question, people were still bitter. And some had progressed to a stage beyond bitterness.
Some were desperate—enough to commit arson, enough to steal from the dead.
24
Shakedown Street
Just as a good airplane pilot should always be looking for places to land, so should a lawyer be looking for situations where large amounts of money were about to change hands.
—KURT VONNEGUT, GOD BLESS YOU, MR. ROSEWATER
In 2007, Rob Spilman took another bottle of scotch to the home of Joe Philpott, the longtime Superior boss.
“Joe, I got some bad news,” he said, and Philpott knew what was coming: They were about to hold another factory wake. The last furniture factory in Bassett, the storied Bassett Superior Lines was about to close.
“I cried like a baby,” Philpott told me. “I loved those people. Look, if I go to Food Lion now, I see four and five people I know, and we’ll hug and kiss. Black and white. Tears will still roll up in my eyes.”
Four years earlier, back when the Dublin plant fell, Philpott’s cousin had bet him a hundred dollars that every one of the Bassett factories would be closed within five years. Philpott hadn’t taken the bet. It had sounded preposterous: A town named Bassett with no Bassett factories?
But even though Bassett Furniture had received $1.54 million in antidumping duties in 2006—designed to buoy its domestic production and protect jobs—the company was now being driven by imports, stores, and custom-assembled domestic products. With a 10 percent increase in imports from 2006 to 2007 and more increases to come, the giant, aging bedroom-furniture plants were being rendered obsolete.
It was official. Bassett was still a company town, to be sure, as Rob Spilman proved to his shareholders and the directors of his board. But it was no longer a factory town.
There were still men and women—designers, marketing people, executives—going to work in the Taj Mahal, though twenty-five of the one hundred and thirty office employees, recent hires mostly, now commuted from Greensboro and other less depressing locales. But no more low-end furniture barreled down the Superior Lines conveyor belt. No more sawdust flew. No more chuckalug, as workers called the zooming conveyor belt that had been the c
ash cow, able to push through two hundred nightstands in a single hour.
Today, the only Bassett-area factory making anything has a random-sounding holdover name—Plant No. 11, a nine-million-dollar structure in the Patriot Centre, a Martinsville industrial park. John Bassett calls it an assembly plant, not a real factory, a claim his nephew vehemently disputes. The two are friendly, though Rob doesn’t relish it when old ladies approach him at family weddings and exclaim, “John Bassett, you have not changed a bit!”
Sawdust may not exactly fly in Plant No. 11, but there are 102 employees who do, custom assembling and finishing casual dining furniture made partially from imported components to the specifications of the customers. What used to require the work of sixteen women is now managed by an Italian-made robotic finishing machine operated by two employees. Products that used to take six to eight weeks to produce now leave the plant within ten days.
Together, men and machine apply the company’s trademarked Indurance, a heat- and scratch-resistant finish. The mass-production chuckalug perfected at Bassett Superior is long gone; individual pieces of furniture are now quasi-designed inside a Bassett store by the end consumer, who uses a store computer to choose from forty-two colors and a thousand fabrics. “We can make just one single piece if we want, then switch [the machine] out,” Rob Spilman said enthusiastically. “And we can have it to her house in thirty days.”
Bassett relies on those lean manufacturing principles at its upholstery plant in Newton, North Carolina, where 450 workers clustered in work cells use computer-controlled routers to build upholstered sofas and chairs using pre-cut imported fabric. Between its eighty-nine stores and corporate offices, Bassett employs fifteen hundred people and sold $321 million worth of furniture in 2013—roughly two-thirds of what it sold at its peak. That decline mirrored the overall industry’s as first globalization then the worst housing market correction in sixty years sliced furniture sales roughly in half. When money is tight, a new dresser can wait. “When things changed, you had to get more nimble,” Rob said.
The company now partners with HGTV, which airs national commercials touting its HGTV Home Design Studio at Bassett. Its signature service is sending a Bassett store consultant to a customer’s home to redesign an entire room. Makeover is an HGTV-friendly buzzword, as are the big reveal and the validator—or the breadwinner, who presumably writes the check. A documentary-style video running on a loop inside the stores spotlights a made-in-America ethos, featuring interviews with furniture workers at the company’s two remaining plants and Rob Spilman talking about his family’s furniture heritage, including his great-grandfather Mr. J.D.
“We have totally re-architected this thing,” Rob said as he walked me through the Martinsville plant in 2013, a few weeks before the company announced a 31 percent increase in quarterly sales. “It was like trying to change a tire while driving down the interstate at seventy miles an hour.”
With retail, which now accounts for two-thirds of overall sales, behind the wheel. “Our stores were telling us we needed better finishes, more high-end furniture, and so that’s really why we were running out of places to sell promotional furniture that came out of Superior Lines,” Rob said. “The old plants were all big, cavernous, and designed to do a lot of volume,” predominantly bedroom furniture. But Bassett’s bedroom furniture, now all imported, makes up just 16 percent of Bassett sales.
“The endgame was to sell furniture, Bassett Furniture, not Bassett bedroom furniture,” he said. And the stores really were helping the bottom line.
In the unincorporated company town, the company ultimately came first, just as it always had.
What the endgame should have been is a matter of opinion, of course, and the opinions in Bassett, Virginia, play out predictably, with a dual narrative that tracks mostly along labor/management lines. But even retired vice president of marketing Joe Meadors, the ultimate company man, believes Bassett Superior could have continued making bedroom furniture profitably—if the stockholders had been willing to wait out the recession. “They were raising Cain at the meetings,” Meadors said. Quarterly dividends, once about twenty cents per share, were cut at the height of the housing recession, in 2009 and 2010, then restored in late 2011.
The company could have been in worse financial straits than it was, with 10 percent annual revenue declines for three of the years between 2003 and 2007. But it had invested $51.7 million in hedge funds, which had produced millions to defray the losses on the company’s balance sheet. “If you lose money selling couches and chairs, how can you pay your investors a hefty dividend?” Fortune magazine asked. “You play the markets.”
Bassett’s 46.9 percent share in High Point’s International Home Furnishings Center had kicked in another six-million-dollars-plus in earnings. The company’s IHFC investment was “the greatest thing Dad ever did for the shareholders,” Rob said. It allowed the company to survive its transition from manufacturer to retailer—in the middle of a recession.
In 2011, the company sold most of its interest in IHFC, netting $74 million in the $275 million sale. That allowed Bassett to dole out $21.5 million in dividends and retire $7 million of common stock the following year.
The line workers I talked to seem to have no notion that the decision to switch to retail, pushed by a silver-tongued consultant in 1997, had played any role in the demise of their jobs.
Were they bitter? John Bassett had wanted to know. Yes, but they seemed to heap most of their ire first on the nebulous, distant enemy—fucking Chi-Comms!—and next on the federal government for not being more like Japan and Germany, with policies that protect industry and encourage jobs.
Followed by Rob Spilman, who accepted millions of dollars in antidumping duties and closed damn near all the factories anyway. It was that or perish, in his view. “I personally think that if we had just stayed in the open market and not done retail, I’m not sure we’d be here today as a company, period. We had to get control of our distribution to survive as a company,” he said.
“We had great big factories that were built to furnish the GIs when they came home from World War Two.” They’d specialized in fast cuttings of “pretty vanilla stuff the consumer no longer wanted,” he added, not hand-carved products from Asia.
In the words of Lee Gale, a former Bassett manager, “Rob struggled to balance the value of those who knew the industry and those who didn’t, and he mostly relied on people from the retail side. He didn’t understand the passion that the line workers who lived in the community had to keep Bassett Furniture successful.”
So the work of people like Minnie Wilson and Maxine Brown was deemed obsolete and old-fashioned, like the smokestacks drawn on the retail consultant’s collage. Wilson had bumped from closing to closing, starting out in the finishing room of the W.M. plant in 1990. She was raising her grandchildren by the time W.M. closed, when she was shifted to Superior Lines, as many of the best employees were.
When Superior closed too, she limped along on unemployment benefits, the three weeks’ of severance pay that was supposed to reward her seventeen-year tenure, and, finally, Social Security. It took her three years to find a part-time job, but she did: handing out coupons and food samples at Walmart.
Unemployment depressed her, especially coinciding as it did with her grandson’s deployment to Iraq. He’d joined the army at eighteen, a month after Superior closed. “There was just no place left for anybody to go for a job,” Wilson said.
In March 2012, demolition workers were in the process of razing the factory when a spark ignited the building. The storied Speed Lines—that place where they were once printin’ money—went up in flames, as the J.D. plant had done a year before, and it took the abandoned table plant next door down with it.
Asthma prevented former Superior worker Maxine Brown from going to watch it burn as so many others in the community did, parking their cars and pickup trucks across the road from the plant and getting as close as they were allowed.
Her husb
and, Wallace Brown, who’d worked at the table plant for thirty-five years, rushed to witness the conflagration, as if paying his respects. He had moved his family from West Virginia to Bassett in 1967, back when work was so plentiful that if you left your house to apply for a job in the morning, “You might as well take your lunch bag with you ’cause you were gonna get a job,” his wife recalled.
False rumors had been circulating that the Superior Lines bricks were being cleaned off and shipped to China, Maxine told me. “China could get our jobs, our timber, our whole nine yards. But when the building caught fire, I thought, At least that’s one brick you won’t get!
“It hurt,” she said, “like a friend passed away. You had worked for thirty-some years with your friends in that building and now, poof, it’s gone. It was like losing your home.”
The Browns were nearing retirement age when the factories closed, able to draw Social Security benefits before their unemployment ran out. Their offspring weren’t so lucky. “Every one of our factories now, they’re gone, so our children and our grandchildren keep having to leave to find work,” she said. Five grandchildren joined the military, four of them deploying (without serious incident) to Afghanistan and Iraq.
One grandson, back from an eighteen-month tour, took out student loans to get a certification in mechanics. But unable to find work in the region after graduating, he moved to Washington, DC—not unlike the way his grandparents had fled their depressed West Virginia mining community to come to Bassett.
About the only thing Maxine and Wallace Brown have left of Bassett is a piece of furniture, the kind of thing the Spilmans and Bassetts would never allow in their homes: a chest of drawers Maxine helped fashion in Superior’s rough end. She also has a table from the J.D. plant that had been slightly marred during production, marked as a cull, and discounted. “One of my kids said I should get rid of that table, but I said no, I want it. It’s a keepsake to me, and I can look back on that and say, ‘I helped ’em make it.’ ”
