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

Summary (from the publisher): 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.

 

Review: "In the early 1960s, Martinsville was Virginia's manufacturing powerhouse, known for being home to more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in the country. But by 2009, one-fifth of the town's labor force was unemployed, and many of the millionaires had fled for cheerier landscapes. Henry County was now the capital of long-term unemployment, with Virginia's highest rate for nine of the past eleven years" (11).

 

Factory Man is about the history of Bassett Furniture Company, once the world's biggest wood furniture manufacturer until the 1980s when competition from Asia rocked the American furniture company.  It's also about Vaughan-Bassett Furniture Co., a competitor to its father company, run by John Bassett III, one of the few willing to fight imported furniture in order to keep production, and jobs, in America. It's the history of small-town America, manufacturing and industry and America, and the aftermath of NAFTA and other policies that sent jobs overseas.

 

It's hard for me to write this review objectively. I grew up and still live in Martinsville. I know many of the people in the book. My brother just started working for Bassett Furniture. And furthermore, I'm living in the economic aftermath that Beth Macy describes as the town of Bassett, Martinsville, and Henry County, Virginia. Therefore, the history described in this book feels deeply personal and supremely interesting to me. On the other hand, I don't think this book is for those from the area alone. I think this story is relevant to all Americans. We've all experienced what the free trade movement has done. Many communities have experienced the aftermath of losing low-skill labor jobs to other countries.

 

Also, I have to say that I went in expecting that reading this was going to make me angry. However, I think Macy has done a good job. She clearly is on the side of the feisty and difficulty John Bassett III, who fought long and hard to keep production in America. But she doesn't make Bassett Furniture look like the villain. Yes, Bob Spilman, who booted John Bassett III out of the company, sounds fairly awful, but Macy quotes both his son and daughter as describing him as such.

 

While the legal battle to keep manufacturing in America got tedious to read in the end of the book, I loved reading about the history. Although I knew some of the history, there's so much in here about my own hometown of which I was ignorant. Reading about how Bassett grew from the hard work and ambition of the Bassett family was fascinating. In fact, the first Bassett in Henry County was Nathaniel Bassett, a "Revolutionary War captain who'd had the good luck to be deeded a 791-acre land grant from King George III in 1773" (24). The founder of the company, J.D. Bassett (grandfather to John Bassett III) capitalized on the area's strengths, including the Smith River, the new line built by the Norfolk and Western railway, and the 21,197 acres owned by the extended Bassett family in Henry County, "most of it thickly forested with walnut, oak, maple, hickory, and other valuable trees" (27). It seems that every man that married into the family got to start their own factory, leading to Hooker Furniture, Weaver Mirror, Vaughn Furniture, and Vaughn-Bassett Furniture.

 

The history of Bassett, both the company and the town, is complicated. Overall, the company has treated its employees well over the years. Bassett Furniture was one of the earliest to begin hiring blacks, giving them an alternative to sharecropping. It provided housing to its workers. And it didn't lay off a single employee during the Great Depression, instead opting for reduced hours. At the same time, longtime employees know the family grew wealthy off of their labor. The closing of numerous plants in the area has created the dire economic circumstances - although it's obvious that no one wanted that to happen.

 

I do wish Macy had included a family tree or had given a more comprehensive overview of the family, because at times that was difficult for me to follow. But I think most of all I just wish her reporting could have revealed a more positive outlook for the area to conclude the book. But she has revealed southern Virginia's current reality. In all, this was a fascinating read about a subject that is deeply personal to me, but is also a valuable lesson for all Americans.

 

Stars: 4.5