By Alec Kohut
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 Wal-Mart again.
-Reau Berry, owner, Johnson/Tombigee Furniture
Too often when economist, pundits, and politicians speak of globalization, it’s from a very macro-economic viewpoint. It’s impact on corporate profits, savings to American consumers, etc. For too rare is the discussion of globalization’s micro-economic impact. The workers and the American towns and cities most impacted by the loss of jobs to cheap labor in the third world.
Author Beth Macy details the mass exodus of furniture manufacturing to China and other cheap labor Asian countries, while not ignoring the very real, and painful cost to American workers. She does so in her story about John Bassett III, the third generation Virginia furniture maker, who becomes an unlikely hero for the factory workers in the town of Galax, Virginia, and people who care America everywhere.
Macy takes the reader through the history of Bassett Furniture, as well as furniture industry as a whole from the time manufacturing moved from New York and Grand Rapids, Michigan, to the lower wage, non-union South. She details the patriarcial family’s rise to power in factory towns such as Bassett and Martinsville, VA, where the family controlled everything from the banks to the churches.
But the real story is John Bassett III (known as JBIII) and his fight against illegal dumping practices by the Chinese, and his Quixotic crusade to keep manufacturing his furniture in the USA. A straight talking, hard-nosed factory man refuses to follow trend of globalization and easy money, to save American jobs.
The book demonstrates how greed, and the need to keep shareholders happy, guarantees that public corporations cannot in even the slightest sense care one iota about American workers, or America at all. These corporations almost gleefully close plants in favor of cheap imports, while hardly even paying lip service to the displaced workers.
Macy also heaps scorn on the free trade advocates, especially Thomas Friedman, who celebrate the cheap imports that have cost so many Americans their livelihood. In the furniture industry alone, 73,000 jobs have been sacrificed to greed.
I could go on for pages, however I will be brief and urge anyone, and everyone who cares at all about America to read this wonderful book.
But make no mistake, Macy is not merely a ideologue in awe of the efforts of JBIII. She is honest and forthright with all the good, bad and ugly of the many facets of the man and family. A honest tale, written with professionalism and journalistic integrity far too rare today.
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