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Summary
Summary
The instant New York Times bestseller about one man's battle to save hundreds of jobs by demonstrating the greatness of American business.
The Bassett Furniture Company was once the world's biggest wood furniture manufacturer. Run by the same powerful Virginia family for generations, it was also the center of life in Bassett, Virginia. But beginning in the 1980s, the first waves of Asian competition hit, and ultimately Bassett was forced to send its production overseas.
One man fought back: John Bassett III, a shrewd and determined third-generation factory man, now chairman of Vaughan-Bassett Furniture Co, which employs more than 700 Virginians and has sales of more than $90 million. In Factory Man , Beth Macy brings to life Bassett's deeply personal furniture and family story, along with a host of characters from an industry that was as cutthroat as it was colorful. As she shows how he uses legal maneuvers, factory efficiencies, and sheer grit and cunning to save hundreds of jobs, she also reveals the truth about modern industry in America.
Author Notes
Beth Macy is a journalist. Her work has appeared in national magazines and The Roanoke Times, where her reporting has won more than a dozen national awards, including a Nieman Fellowship for Journalism at Harvard. Her first book, Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local - and Helped Save an American Town, was published in 2014.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In her first book, winner of the 2013 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, Roanoke Times reporter Macy explores the effects of globalization on America's furniture manufacturing industry via the story of the Bassetts, a family from Virginia, whose Bassett Furniture Company was once the world's largest producer of wooden furniture. In the 1980s, cheap Chinese imports began to flood the U.S. market, prompting many domestic furniture makers to move their factories abroad. But John Bassett III fought back. A "larger-than-life rule breaker," J.B. III (as he was known) hired top trade lawyer Joe Dorn and convinced members of the U.S. furniture manufacturing industry to support him in filing a petition against China for unfair trade practices, ultimately saving his company, Vaughan-Bassett (an offshoot of the family business), along with hundreds of jobs. Macy's riveting narrative is rich in local color. It traces the history of the Bassett family and the U.S. furniture trade, from the "billowing smokestacks" of Southern towns along Route 58 to the imposing factory complex near Dalian, China, and eventually to Vietnam and Indonesia, where manufacturers sought ever-cheaper labor. Macy interviews the Bassett family, laid-off and retired workers, executives in Asia, and many others, providing vivid reporting and lucid explanations of the trade laws and agreements that caused a way of life to disappear. Agent: Peter McGuigan, Foundry Literary + Media. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
The story of one mans fight to save American furniture manufacturing jobs in the face of a deluge of cheap Chinese imports.In this welcome debut, winner of the 2013 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award,Roanoke Timesreporter Macy brings to life the rise of family-owned Bassett Furniture Company as the worlds largest producer of wooden furniture and John Bassett IIIs epic struggle to keep his company in business amid unfair overseas business practices that forced many U.S. manufacturers to move their factories abroad. A brash, patriotic charmer fond of quoting George Patton (When in doubt, ATTACK), Bassett came from a long line of wealthy Virginians with sawdust in their veins. The fucking Chi-Comms were not going to tellhimhow to make furniture! remarked one retailer. Drawing on prodigious research and interviews with a wide range of subjects, including babysitters, retired workers and Chinese executives, Macy recounts how Bassett, now in his mid-70s, mobilized the majority of American furniture manufacturers to join him in seeking U.S. government redress for unfair Chinese trade practices. The authors brightly written, richly detailed narrative not only illuminates globalization and the issue of offshoring, but succeeds brilliantly in conveying the human costs borne by low-income people displaced from a way of lifei.e., factory jobs that their Appalachian families had worked for generations. Writing with much empathy, Macy gives voice to former workers who must now scrape by on odd jobs, disability payments and, in some cases, thievery of copper wire from closed factories. Her book is also a revealing account of the paternalistic Bassett dynasty, whose infighting was a constant diversion for everyone living in the company town. Ultimately, Bassetts efforts saved some 700 jobs and his Vaughan-Bassett company, the nations largest wood bedroom furniture maker.A masterly feat of reporting. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Following the 1994 ratification of NAFTA, when U.S. corporations began reaping greater profits by shipping jobs overseas, one of the hardest-hit American industries was furniture making. Scores of factories were closed, leaving thousands of workers unemployed, including those from the country's furniture-manufacturing hub in Virginia, as Asian markets began hawking their tables and chairs to increasingly spendthrift buyers. After his own Vaughan-Bassett furniture operation began hemorrhaging workers and profits, however, John Bassett III refused to knuckle under to the foreign competition. Journalist Macy, whose reporting often champions underdogs and outsiders, tells the inspiring story here of the crusty septuagenarian's fight to save his company and employees' livelihoods, using legal tactics and business savvy. One particularly street-smart maneuver involved Bassett's trip into the lion's den of a Chinese dresser-making enterprise, exposing its owner's price-fixing practices to World Trade Organization watchdogs. Macy's down-to-earth writing style and abundance of personal stories from manufacturing's beleaguered front lines make her work a stirring critique of globalization.--Hays, Carl Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to read Beth Macy's "Factory Man" without casting the inevitable movie version to come. Picture an updated "Norma Rae" in which the hero isn't an oppressed factory worker but a desperate factory owner battling scheming relatives, callous Wall Street bankers and ruthless Chinese competitors - all to save his workers' jobs and his family's bricks-and-mortar legacy, a furniture business in a speck of a town in south central Virginia. Who would play the black sheep turned white knight, John D. Bassett III? George Clooney or Tom Hanks? How about Meryl Streep or Blythe Danner as the family matriarch, Pocahontas Hundley Bassett, a.k.a. Miss Pokey? And what tough-talking star - Ted Danson, perhaps? - would take on the role of the devious brother-in-law, Bob Spilman, who, by Macy's account, snatched control of the family business away from the rightful heir, the aforementioned "JBIII"? And what of the book's villain, Larry Moh, the Chinese übercapitalist seemingly bent on putting American furniture makers out of business? Or the fancy lawyers who wind up making more money than anybody else? "Factory Man" is so thick with rich characters, family secrets and backwoods wisdom that this very abundance becomes its one flaw. The first half of the book is given over to Bassett history in great detail. John D. Bassett Sr. founded the business in 1902, but the family was illustrious long before then. Mr. J.D., as his employees knew him, was a descendant of a Revolutionary War captain to whom King George III had deeded 791 acres of Virginia farmland in 1773. But the imaginative, ambitious Bassett and his equally driven wife - that would be Miss Pokey - set up a small store and inn, and eventually made themselves indispensable in the town that soon carried the family name. Then, in a move that would serve both as the key to their success and as ironic portent, the couple cased a Michigan furniture factory and figured that they could outdo the Grand Rapids craftsmen instead of shipping them all their good Virginia walnut, oak, hickory and more. Bassett workers became experts at copying and massproducing furniture; even if the product wasn't especially finely made, it was good enough to satisfy a swelling middle class. The Bassetts got rich by following the dictum of Henry Ford: "Sell to the classes, eat with the masses. Sell to the masses, eat with the classes." And everything worked out fine for a good long while. By 1967, Fortune magazine deemed Bassett the world's largest manufacturer of wood furniture. Throughout that time Bassett remained a family business - run by various sons and sons-in-law, that is - and, not surprisingly, managed with the kind of paternalism common to its time and place. Bassett, Va., became a company town in which Bassetts owned or controlled just about everything: the banks, the schools, the church, the local government and, essentially, the people who lived there. According to Macy, in the late 1930s, Mr. J.D. "liked to buy ice cream and peanuts for kids at baseball games, and he could afford to, with six humming factories that sent freight cars laden with Bassett furniture all over the country." It didn't matter that the furniture company was the only game in town, because just about anyone who wanted to work could do so - at a living wage. The Bassetts even employed blacks when other businesses wouldn't, though, as befit the times, at lower wages and in dirtier jobs. With their profits, the family hired servants, went on expensive vacations and furnished their homes with fine antiques - no one wanted tacky Bassett merchandise at home - and sometimes behaved badly: Macy reports that one of the black women who worked in the family mansion wore two girdles to keep the wandering hands of Bassett men at bay. There were also the kind of natural rivalries that occur in most families but particularly families with a lot of money and legacies that matter. JBIII spent most of his youth and early career trying to prove that he wasn't an heirhead, with other relatives just as invested in proving the opposite. This was particularly true of his sister's husband, Bob Spilman, who blocked young John Bassett at every turn. It is this prodigal son narrative that dominates the second half of the book, as globalization takes hold and the family fortunes turn. In the 1980s, American furniture makers began to find themselves in a bind; to compete with cheaper products made abroad, they had to begin manufacturing abroad too. The result, of course, was that foreign (mostly Chinese) companies sent representatives here to learn the business and solicit contracts - and, just as the Bassetts had done long ago, promptly undercut their American tutors by offering knockoffs at substantially cheaper prices. Americans had become perilously shortsighted: "If the price is right, you will do anything," a Taiwanese businessman told John Bassett. "We have never seen people before who are this greedy - or this naïve." The rising tide of the global economy was supposed to float all boats, but as the Bassetts soon discovered, it didn't. Yes, American consumers initially benefited from the availability of cheaper furniture made offshore, and the workers in poor countries started enjoying better lives. But the Americans who actually made things - and whose labor made families like the Bassetts rich - began to suffer. With local factories closing, families began losing their jobs, their homes and their life savings, along with their hopes. "If somebody wants to predatorily kill your industry and take market share, that's fine as long as the consumer can get it a little cheaper?" Bassett's son Wyatt asked Macy at one point. "But what happens when they destroy your industry and then raise prices 30 percent once all your factories are gone?" What had been a thriving business was soon decimated. From 2000 to 2002, furniture imports from China jumped 121 percent, and by 2003, offshoring had cost American furniture makers and related companies 73,000 jobs. Faced with closing his factories and laying off loyal employees, Bassett chose to take a stand. Instead of capitulating - selling out for zillions and letting his workers go hang - he cut costs, upgraded product lines and kept layoffs to a minimum. Bassett, a "Republican-leaning independent," in Macy's words, even turned to the federal government for help, pushing representatives to enforce trade regulations against the Chinese. The company broke even in 2012, with shareholder equity at $114.5 million, which Bassett considered a victory. The best furniture makers know that too much ornamentation can spoil a lovely line. The same holds true for the best storytellers, who know that telling too much can be as dangerous as telling too little, and that, finally, craft is all. In this, her first book, Macy's passion and enthusiasm are palpable on every page, but more judicious editing would have given the tale greater clarity and narrative power, and made the heroes and villains more alive on the page. Still, her chronicle of this quest is important because she makes a complex, now universal story understandable. Macy cares about ordinary Americans in the same way Bassett does, and in the same way so many Wall Street players and corporate shareholders do not. By 2003, offshoring had cost American furniture manufacturers 73,000 jobs. MIMI SWARTZ is an executive editor at Texas Monthly.
Library Journal Review
"Fight harder than everybody else" is the motto of John Bassett III, the folksy but cunning scion of the eponymous furniture company. Bassett has proven his point by taking on Chinese companies that were dumping furniture into the U.S. market at artificially low prices, forcing -American manufacturers out of business. He formed a coalition with other manufacturers, and they eventually won their case with the International Trade Commission in 2003. It was a hollow victory though, as most of the plants had already closed. This lengthy work written by investigative journalist Macy details the history of that case. It is much more than that, however, as the corporate and family feuds described are worthy of the television show Dallas. The book is also a story of the town Bassett, VA, and the workers-the Vaughan-Bassett Furniture Co. (founded in 1902) today employs more than 700 -Virginians-who are struggling to hang on in a rapidly declining economy. VERDICT Macy, herself the daughter of an assembly-line worker, offers a well-researched title that reads like a novel, with plenty of juicy characters and dialog. For public library and university business collections.-Susan Hurst, Miami Univ. Libs., Oxford, OH (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.