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

by Macy, Beth

  At Panca Wana, managers were already replacing some workers with machines, and the minimum wage was predicted to increase another 20 percent nationwide by the end of the year. Exactly where would the next jobs land?

  Where would the globe-trotting Appalachian hardwood go next, and would the drilling-induced mud that it marinated in be far behind? It was a globalized world indeed, down to the Sidoarjo bugs etching those tiny scratches and dings.

  Ten months after my trip, in January of 2014, Ledger said Indonesia’s minimum wage had risen again, to two hundred dollars a month. With an impending election, he worried about possible political instability. The company was considering beefing up efforts in Vietnam again, but capacity there was finite, he told me, and many Vietnamese factories were now busy supplying China’s growing middle class. The Chinese “pay well, are less picky, and the logistics are easier to manage,” he said.

  Furniture-making would leave Indonesia much sooner than ten years, he now believed, predicting the reshoring of furniture jobs to America, only this time with higher-skilled lean manufacturing and increased technology. “Hopefully the Stanleys and Bassetts of the world have managed to hold onto their factories so they are able to take full advantage,” he said.

  The two sure bets? First, that the Stanley stamp on the back of that sideboard could not begin to document its provenance. And second, that soon after we returned from Asia, my cell phone would ring.

  “How fast were they running?” John Bassett wanted to know.

  It was the same question he’d asked after I visited the Robbinsville factory several months before. He and Goldstein are friendly competitors, touring each other’s plants and swapping ideas about machinery.

  I hadn’t clocked the Robbinsville lines with a stopwatch, but they seemed to be running fine, I reported.

  “Remember this,” he said. “You only make money when the sawdust is flying, not when you’re messing around setting up your machines.”

  When I ventured that the Robbinsville factory looked higher tech than Vaughan-Bassett’s, at least to my untrained eye, his hackles went up, and that already booming voice had my cell phone vibrating in my hand. “Listen, we know where every piece of our inventory is at any time. We don’t have to look at a damn row of computer monitors to know what we have.”

  The next time I visited Vaughan-Bassett, the mud turtle was on the move, and he was throwing around his favorite word: alacrity. He was positively obsessed with speed and volume, upping productivity in every corner of his plant. “I wanna change people’s attitudes about manufacturing in this country,” he said, unleashing a breathless torrent of JBIII-isms. “Before I die, I’d like to have made a little bit of an impression.”

  And: “Everybody thinks all the great ideas come outta MIT, but let me tell you, there’s a great deal of innovation that comes off the factory floor.”

  And: “If we close everything, that innovation’s gonna move to wherever the factory is. We gotta invest in America instead of derivatives!”

  And: “Sooner or later we’ve got to turn and face our enemy again. I did it, and you know what I found out? They’re not as damn tough as everybody thinks they are.”

  It was the fall of 2012, and he’d just turned seventy-five.

  He said he planned to semi-retire at the end of the year, though he grew antsy any time he left the factory for more than a few days. (The Vaughan-Bassett middle managers got more phone calls when he was in Florida and not there to witness things firsthand.) Barring some kind of disability, he finally conceded, the only way he’d ever completely retire was “if they take me out behind the lumber stacks and shoot me.”

  Meanwhile, he intends to drill poster-board point number three into every employee he can reach: Be willing to change and improve, again and again and again.

  That fall he hung mirrors in his machine room, and not so the ladies could check their lipstick. Workers weren’t feeding panels through the gang saw fast enough for him. The housing market wasn’t rebounding fast enough either. Orders were down, and, human nature being what it was, employees understood that if they worked too quickly, they might soon be on short time.

  JBIII had to do something to speed the panel-cutting along. The machine feeder had long relied on the person tailing the machine to signal with a wave before passing the next panel through. So he hauled in ten-dollar mirrors and had them suspended from water pipes on the ceiling. The mirrors allowed the machine feeder to anticipate the handoff sooner, speeding up the process some 20 percent.

  Next he tackled the three Italian-made five-axis routers, purchased to the tune of $1.2 million. Rather than spend a fortune on computer monitors, as Stanley had done, JBIII had an electrician screw Walmart wall clocks onto the side of each one.

  At the start of each shift, the clocks began ticking the seconds off every time the machine was reset or otherwise not spewing sawdust. It was his commonsense (read: “cheap”) answer to measuring machinery downtime.

  If the clock counter showed one of the three routers drastically behind the other two in production by the end of the day, then the guy operating that machine had to get eyeball-to-eyeball with Wyatt or JBIII. An added incentive to keep the line moving along: every person passing by that machine could look up and see exactly how much progress was or wasn’t being made.

  The operators rolled their eyes about it, yes, but they were not surprised. “He’s very much beloved by the people on the floor,” said Jim Stout, the manufacturing technology director. “But they also know that every now and then he’s gonna come through and boost things because he’s a Bassett, and the Bassetts have always done that kind of thing.”

  Production levels went up substantially when the three machine operators began competing with one another, as John had known would happen. It was the old grouse hunters come to life again. The method was not unlike the time he’d convinced his wife to give up cigarettes, a case he’d been pleading for several years: He and Pat were attending a middle-aged relative’s wedding to a much younger bride. As the trophy bride sauntered down the aisle of the church, lean and tan and wrinkle-free, John leaned over to Pat and whispered, “After you die of lung cancer, I’m gonna get me one of those.” Two days later, she put down her cigarettes for good.

  He was a pain, yes, and maybe even “an asshole,” as his competitors liked to say. But few workers grumbled aloud because they understood: he really was the last factory man standing, and he was doing everything he could think of to save their jobs, from hanging mirrors from the rafters and providing free doctor visits to telling the Chinese just exactly where they could put their hundred-dollar dressers.

  “We spend all this time training our guys on computers, but you know what? They can’t stop my simple wall clock once it gets hooked up,” he said. “I hate to go back to sex again. But some things people have been doing the same way for a long time, and you know what? It’s still pretty good!”

  27

  “Sheila, Get Me the Governor!”

  When John reinvented his company, it was almost like he became first-generation again.

  —DOUG BASSETT LANE, MR. J.D.’S GREAT-GRANDSON AND FORMER EXECUTIVE OF LANE FURNITURE (NOW PART OF FURNITURE BRANDS)

  In his khaki pants and sweater vest, the aging patriarch climbed atop the creaky conveyor belt. He was beaming with his cat-pouncing grin, a smile that could only be described—in Galax, anyway—as tee-totally victorious. He was about to announce the reopening of the Webb Furniture plant next door, a factory that had closed in 2006, eliminating three hundred jobs.

  Over the next three years, he said, he would invest eight million dollars to upgrade the old plant and would rehire some 115 of the town’s 1,300 displaced furniture workers in an enterprise he was calling Vaughan-Bassett II. Now he was not only the largest employer in Galax but also the largest manufacturer of wooden bedroom furniture in America.

  A podium had been hauled in for the announcement, a microphone installed, and chairs lined up for the
politicians and the press. Boxed lunches were on hand for the media (Doug’s idea) as well as for the Vaughan-Bassett workers (John’s), who got both chicken sandwiches and the gift of not having to clock out for lunch.

  The region’s movers and shakers sat before John Bassett and his sons in rows of folding chairs arranged like church pews. Beside them stood hundreds of Vaughan-Bassett workers clad in denim and T-shirts and flannel, the whole tableau dwarfed by a giant American flag that had been tacked behind them on the cabinet-room wall. Along the periphery stood millions of dollars’ worth of high-tech machinery—much of it Byrd money–funded—and rows upon rows of dressers, nightstands, and beds.

  Few people understood how many hurdles John Bassett’s team had jumped to bring this announcement to fruition: the last-minute strings pulled to nab state and city economic-development incentives plus the $200,000 in tobacco commission funds (via a program that promotes economic growth in tobacco-dependent communities using proceeds from the national tobacco settlement). He wanted the money not so much because he needed it but because it gave a stamp of legitimacy to what he was trying to do.

  Few knew about the phone calls to the governor, who was in South Carolina campaigning for Mitt Romney at the time. The sixty-six text messages Doug Brannock exchanged with state senator Bill Stanley to make it all happen after Brannock very casually mentioned at the end of one manager meeting, “Well, I guess it’s too late to get any grants.”

  “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!” John Bassett had snapped.

  Brannock had momentarily forgotten poster-board lesson number one: If you don’t think you’ll win, you will lose.

  For the next eight days, every official or economic developer with any ties at all to the region received the full-on Bassett, the battle plan being tenacity + speed = victory. “Guys, we’ve got to move with a-la-cri-ty!” he barked.

  JBIII hadn’t even voted for Senator Stanley, a Republican from Franklin County, having been friends with his opponent, the incumbent, most of his life. But during the fall 2011 campaign, Stanley had stopped by Vaughan-Bassett for the requisite tour and poster-board speech. He promised John Bassett he would help protect his interests if he got elected, even if he didn’t get John’s vote.

  After which JBIII peered over his glasses and agreed to support him if he won—as long as Stanley (no relation to the furniture makers) left him his personal cell phone number, and “not the one with some little ole eighteen-year-old girl answering the phone.”

  John Bassett doesn’t forget promises, and he never loses a phone number (because, well, he gives it to Sheila). When he called in his Bill Stanley chit, he barked at the newly installed senator, “Are y’all gonna sit on your asses in Richmond, or are you gonna get it done?”

  And: “Be sure the governor’s here so he can take all the credit.”

  What normally takes the machinations of state government two or three months was nailed in eight glorious, debate-filled days. The senator got to witness what the management team at Vaughan-Bassett had learned years ago from the Taiwanese translator turned spy to the controller who reinvented corporate health care: People like being part of a live-wire organization. Some even like working for someone for whom cain’t is the only dirty word. As Garet Bosiger put it, “He may be an asshole, but when he’s your asshole, that’s a very good thing.”

  At the podium, John Bassett III leaned into a microphone that his booming baritone didn’t need. It carried across the lumber stacks, past the congressman and the state senator, past the sanding-room employees. It echoed through the high-tech machinery he’d bought with the money he got from standing up to the Chinese, from beating them fay-ah and squay-ah.

  He’d lowered his prices, reengineered every inch of his manufacturing process, and hadn’t hesitated to have a penalty called when he learned what the international trade laws could do for him up in Washington.

  And because he’d given the middle finger to China, Vaughan-Bassett was in a position to expand as soon as the economy started growing again.

  This time he quoted billionaire investor Warren Buffett: “ ‘If you wait for the robins to come back and you wait for the dogwoods to bloom, you’re too late.’

  “Guys, this is January,” he said in a speech only the most churlish of cynics could have denounced. “The robins aren’t here, and the dogwoods ain’t blooming. But come April, we will be hee-ah.”

  The move wouldn’t exactly save Galax, which has always had more industry diversity than its furniture-making cousin company towns to the east. But without Vaughan-Bassett as the corporate backbone, the town’s other employers—including a mirror and glass company called Consolidated that used to make mirrors for the region’s furniture makers but now specializes in hurricane- and bulletproof glass—might not have stayed or prospered. An upholstery factory, Mississippi-based Albany Furniture, might not have opened in one of the old Vaughan plants, community leaders say. And the giant Lowe’s and Walmart would have had a hard time making it without the infusion of cash from those factories’ workers.

  Galax without Vaughan-Bassett?

  “It would look like Martinsville,” said Bill Webb, head of the Virginia Employment Commission in Galax.

  “It would look like Bassett,” said Ray Kohl, the Galax tourism director who wants to display the world’s largest bed as a tourist attraction, not unlike the world’s largest dresser in High Point or Thomasville’s world’s largest chair.

  There were other precedents for the world’s largest bed. In 2009, Bassett Furniture had erected a twenty-foot-tall Mission-style chair, dubbed the Big Chair, in Martinsville’s uptown. Built in 2002 in celebration of the company’s hundredth anniversary, for seven years it toured the country to herald the opening of Bassett Furniture stores before it found its “final resting place… right here in the seat of the furniture industry,” as Rob Spilman put it at a press conference.

  He’d donated it for use in the region’s new Deep Roots heritage tourism campaign, whose organizers installed it beside the abandoned American of Martinsville offices. That was two years after Bassett Furniture closed its last factory in Bassett and a year after American and Stanley Furniture closed their nearby factories’ doors. When the chair went up, the region counted 3,000 people employed in furniture. By 2013, that figure was down to 651, most of them office and warehouse workers.

  “If they threw a giant sweatshirt over the chair, it would complete the picture,” said Tripp Smith, a Martinsville food-bank volunteer. He shared that sentiment in a letter to the Martinsville Bulletin, writing: “I feel we should have the uptown chair monstrosity dismantled, packed up in a box and shipped to China. I’m sure we could find an empty container headed that way.” (The three-ton chair was eventually taken down for repairs, and a decision was later made to “retire it,” the newspaper reported in February 2014.)

  Smith’s comment was meant as snark. But in fact, Smith’s dig was prescient: Within two years, the number one export at the Virginia Port Authority was logs and lumber. The number one import? That very same wood making its way back across the ocean to Virginia as dressers, tables, and chairs stamped with the names Bassett, Stanley, Hooker, and Vaughan.

  JBIII doesn’t need to erect the world’s largest bed to ensure his legacy. His factories—and the others he helped save with his coalition—speak for him. Reau Berry, the sole owner of Mississippi-based Johnston/Tombigbee, took the $13 million he received in Byrd money and bought equipment that allowed him to hasten his manufacturing lead time and craft a piece of hotel furniture in twenty-four hours instead of two weeks. He also paid vendors and other bills.

  “If Senator Byrd is not in heaven when I get there, I’m gonna be very disappointed,” he said. “That money allowed me to compete with China, and it saved my factory,” which employs a hundred and fifty people, down from four hundred at its peak, Berry added. “We’re not getting rich, but we’re not going out of business either. And every dollar I pay somebody—whether it’s thro
ugh my payroll or to a vendor—you can multiply it by seven.

  “The real value in manufacturing is creating a community where cash flows. If the American people only realized what’s taken place, they wouldn’t ever buy anything from Walmart again.”

  John Bassett’s rhetoric is less charged, more politically considered. When it comes to his relatives who went the other way or to the retailers who bailed on him, he tends to keep his mouth shut. He’s been three steps ahead of most of them all along anyway.

  Take the winter of 2013, one decade after the fracas began. Business was sluggish, and short time was rearing its ugly head. The company had made $25 million in profits in 2012, which was exactly what it had netted from its last stack of Byrd money checks. It broke even, in other words, though its balance sheet was solid, with shareholder equity of $114.5 million.

  A segment of John’s opposition, led by Ashley Furniture, was in appeals court suing to get a portion of that money, arguing that even though the company had opposed the coalition at the ITC, it had still been making furniture domestically when the petition was filed, and, based on its First Amendment right of free speech, it deserved a portion of the already distributed funds. The case was tied up in federal appeals court, and JBIII had his top-shelf lawyer in Washington on the clock. “It’s all about the money, you know,” he said. “The lawyers all get paid by the hour, and they like to keep it all rolling along.”

  As a safeguard against an appeal ruling that might not go his way, John had socked most of his last stash of Byrd money away in CDs—in case he had to return some of it. “You never know how long a snake is till you kill him and stretch him out,” he said, again.

  Then he went back to work. He dispatched himself, Doug, and Wyatt to different sections of the country. In one thirty-six-hour span, the seventy-five-year-old hit South Dakota, St. Paul, and Salt Lake City, drumming up business and getting eyeball-to-eyeball with retailers who had been criticizing his stand against imports for years.