by Macy, Beth
The Byrd checks arrived in stacks, due to some arcane rule prohibiting the federal government from writing million-dollar checks.
“You’ll get [something like] twelve checks for $999,999.99, and then one check for $2.13,” John Bassett told me one afternoon at his Roaring Gap home.
“You couldn’t make it up,” his wife, Pat, said, shaking her head.
“Well, you know what, they haven’t bounced,” he deadpanned.
Vaughan-Bassett invested $23 million of the money in new plant equipment, contributed 10 percent of it to its employee profit-sharing plan, and used some of it to start a companywide free health clinic for families. The money saved upwards of seven hundred jobs in Galax, which, in turn, as some have argued, have saved the town. It allowed Vaughan-Bassett to go from not being in the top five wooden bedroom-furniture producers in the country a decade ago to being number one now.
The economists may cry foul, and the Chinese may protest.
But as John Bassett put it, his voice rising: “Our critics have never had to stand in front of five hundred people, like I have, and tell ’em they’re not gonna have a job. And watch women cry because they don’t know what’s gonna happen to their families or how they’re gonna feed their children. This is not like picking up a telephone from your office on Wall Street and saying, ‘Close factory number thirty-six down in Alabama.’ These are people we look in the eye every day!”
PART VIII
25
Mud Turtle
I guess we traded our jobs for somebody somewhere else in the world to have a better life, I don’t know.
—SAWMILLER TIM LUPER
In 2006, John Bassett tasked controller Doug Brannock with putting a lid on the factory’s rising health-care costs. Even with the company paying 75 percent of each of the workers’ premiums, half the workforce couldn’t afford to join the plan and went without insurance entirely. The ones who did have it didn’t go to the doctor unless they were very sick, trying to avoid the twenty-five-dollar co-pay. Some employees with high blood pressure went without their medication because they didn’t think they could afford the pills.
JBIII worried about that. He gave Brannock three months to negotiate something with the company’s insurer and a local internal medicine practice, and what Brannock came up with was an entirely new concept: At a cost to the company of $350,000 a year, the Vaughan-Bassett Free Clinic would offer weekday afternoon and Saturday hours to accommodate both the first and second factory shifts (so workers who weren’t too sick could still nab their attendance bonuses). It was located off-site, several blocks from the factory, part of an already existing clinic with a nurse-practitioner on staff and a doctor on call.
From preventive checkups to sick visits, anything that didn’t require the expertise of a specialist was covered at no charge to the employee, without any deductibles or co-pays. Workers’ family members also had access at no charge—“Even my mother if she wants to go can go, as long as there’s an opening for her,” Brannock said—because the company has already paid a captive rate for the slots. A list of three-dollar generic drugs available at Walmart made its way into every employee’s hands.
Shirley Johnson, aka the hot-glue lady, started taking her blood pressure medicine for the first time in years. And health-care costs associated with the regular medical plan plummeted, as most workers opted to use the free clinic regularly, which decreased the need for expensive acute-care visits and more than made up for the $350,000 clinic cost. In the spring of 2013, the company’s manufacturing technology director Jim Stout found out he’d had an undetected heart attack through a routine screening at the factory offered to all employees. Several tests later, he learned he’d been walking around with an 80 percent blockage in two of his coronary arteries. He was in surgery within the week to prevent another, more serious attack.
“It would not have been caught without the screenings. I had just been chopping wood and felt a little tired. But I’d thought it was just age,” he said. “I could have died.”
Health-care costs don’t go down immediately under the new plan, Stout pointed out, which is why so few employers think to try it. “It takes a year to eighteen months to see the effects [on the insurance claims] of preventive care. But John doesn’t get nervous about things like that.
“He has a belief, and he follows through.”
Before the clinic opened, some of the young factory workers had never been to a doctor in their adult lives, and Stout wasn’t the only one saved by a clinic test. Costs to the company, which spent $1.45 million annually on health care, remained flat even though insurance rates grew 12 percent to 20 percent annually over the same period nationwide.
But that wasn’t what drove the decision to start the clinic, John Bassett and his sons insist. They were worried about their workers and their workers’ families not going to the doctor, and someone needed to act.
JBIII had already tangoed with the CEOs of Winston-Salem’s Baptist Hospital and Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina a year earlier, after a newspaper reported that the two entities were locked in a reimbursement dispute that had the potential to prevent twenty-five thousand patients—including his workers—from using the region’s number one hospital. “Sheila, get them on the phone!” he’d barked over the partition from his conference-room table turned desk.
As Doug Bassett tells it, his father gave both executives an old-fashioned, Bassett-style ass-chewing. “I don’t care what the details are, but the two of you are acting like children. I have seven hundred employees, and what you’re doing now could affect three thousand lives. You two settle it by the end of the day, or I’ll settle it.”
By the end of the day, a press release was drafted: the companies were still at an impasse, but Vaughan-Bassett employees would not be affected by the dispute.
“He called ’em up and talked to them like they were the naughtiest fourth-graders he’d ever seen,” Doug recalled. “It was a classic John-Bassett-solved-in-a-day.”
When I asked JBIII about the dustup, he quoted Shakespeare’s Brutus, who said he loved Caesar but killed him anyway because he loved Rome more. His point being: America didn’t have enough leaders who loved the country more than their individual interests. “Who’s gonna speak up for these people if we don’t?” he said. “You think somebody down there running a ripsaw is gonna call the chairman of Blue Cross? Oh hell no!”
It was paternalism at its finest, not unlike Mr. J.D. telling the racist doctor to pack his bags. Someone had to tell those boys what their job was.
There was just one problem with the Vaughan-Bassett Free Clinic. Though every employee was strongly encouraged to get a free preventive physical, several dozen refused to go, nearly all of them men. Many were smokers who didn’t want to be lectured. Some feared they had diabetes—or worse—and didn’t care to know.
A few clung to stubborn libertarian beliefs, like the chain-smoking sample engineer Linda McMillian who thought the company was playing Big Brother and resented the intrusion into her private life. “People are too obsessed with their health,” she told me. “I don’t go to the doctor unless I feel bad.”
Doug and Wyatt were baffled. They asked personnel managers to assure those who were refusing the annual physicals that federal privacy laws prevented their bosses from seeing the results. “They thought, The company wants to know what I’m doing on the weekends,” Brannock said of the sixty who flat-out refused.
So JBIII grabbed the list of noncompliant employees and said, “Why don’t you let me handle this?”
He picked up his legal pad and composed a letter to the offending employees. If thirty days passed and the workers still hadn’t submitted to the physical, he threatened to rescind their families’ use of the free clinic.
He instructed Sheila to mail the letters that Friday afternoon, strategically timed for Saturday receipt—and told her to address the letters to the men’s wives. “I let Mama take care of it!” he boasted. “I let Mama
put a finger in their face!”
By Monday afternoon, fifty-three men had signed up for physicals. They reminded John of toy soldiers, standing in a line that stretched out the clinic doors. Two of the men learned they had diabetes and thanked him, eventually, for making them go.
There are many sayings among the country people who live in and around Galax, among the families who’ve been sawmilling and fiddling and wood culling for generations. Several of the sayings have to do with furniture and factories, a holdover from when furniture was by far the region’s main enterprise, before five of the six Galax plants fell. “We had a good Market” meant the orders poured in after the semiannual High Point show. Chances were, workers would therefore not be on “short time” and might even get to work “five and a half days” with time-and-a-half pay for Saturday morning.
There was another saying you heard a lot back in 2008, when Vaughan Furniture Company—which had once employed 2,200 people—closed its last plant in Galax, even though the factory had just received $3.3 million in antidumping duties. “The plant closing is not the fault of the employees of Vaughan Furniture Company,” said CEO Bill Vaughan, who blamed it on the “continued popularity” of imports among his customers.
The company had recently built a new corporate office on the outskirts of town, a three-story brick structure that was now a command center for its importing efforts and its forty employees. (Internet connection? Check. Fax machine and factory turned warehouse? Check. Extra office space that can later be used as rental property? Check.)
“Why’d they build that right before they shut everything down?” town historian John Nunn said, echoing the question on everyone’s mind. “I think the Vaughans panicked, and fear makes you think, If everybody else is doing the same thing, they must be right.”
The Vaughans were so impressed by the cheap Chinese furniture, especially the ornate high-end stuff, that they didn’t anticipate any issues with the retailers, explained retired Vaughan sales executive John McGhee. “The thought at first was, We’ll get an even bigger profit margin if we go high-end, and we all just went gaga for the prices,” he recalled.
But eventually Vaughan’s retail customers did the same calculations, and they started flying to China themselves. “The Chinese had sucked us into buying the furniture and teaching ’em how to make it,” he added—the one thing the retailers could not have done.
“And who got hurt? We got hurt!” he said. “The Chinese more or less slit our throats.”
Bill Vaughan, now a lawyer in Galax, declined to be interviewed, writing in an e-mail that he didn’t “have any wish to rehash old news.”
Those still spinning from the closings are rehashing it, though. As sawmiller Tim Luper of nearby Fries put it, “The Vaughans were still making [some profit] at those Galax plants and decided to close them anyway, and people who depended on that work were mad.
“But they’ve learned that John Bassett will wait till he’s down to his last dime [of profit] before he closes Vaughan-Bassett. He’s like a mud turtle that lives in a creek. If you get bit by one, it won’t let loose till the sun goes down. Mr. Bassett is just like that. He’ll hold on to the end.”
Luper has become a kind of mud turtle himself, working to keep his business viable in the wake of Galax’s furniture-factory closings. He mills lumber for log homes now, mostly vacation getaways for people who don’t need to take out mortgages. He had to invest thousands in new equipment so he could produce the wood for tongue-and-groove flooring—at the same time the price of the lumber plummeted because demand was so low.
Among the displaced thirteen hundred furniture workers in Galax, those in their fifties and sixties had the toughest time recovering from the closings. Luper has friends his age who mow grass, clean homes, wash cars, and make crafts and foodstuffs—anything to manage until their Social Security kicks in. A minister and food-bank operator told me she’s counseled a handful of folks who are camping out in the woods.
A Facebook yard-sale page created by a twenty-nine-year-old hotel night auditor gets visited by nearly everyone in the town of seven thousand. In January 2013, it had more than eleven thousand members, counting residents of surrounding counties, and featured house-cleaning and clothes-washing services for as little as four dollars an hour. One continuing controversy involves members who try to resell drink mixes, power bars, and canned goods that have been donated to them by a local charity. “Is that right or wrong? It’s not for me to say,” moderator Jessy Shrewsbury told me. “Some people are just very desperate for money to pay their bills.”
A combined United Way and Goodwill program trains workers over fifty for job placement, and tourism in the quirky mountain town has risen by a third in the past three years, thanks to a strong focus on authentic music and crafts (including furniture woodworking) and nature trails. There’s a funky cowboy-boot-shop-and-history-museum combo near the outskirts of town, the main attractions being a stuffed two-headed calf enshrined in a glass case, Carhartt jackets, and Frye boots.
The fiddlers’ convention—known by old-time musicians all over the world as simply Galax—now attracts forty thousand visitors each year, and Galax is also home to Virginia’s most visited state park as well as the state barbecue competition. Virginia’s number one barbecue maker gets a trophy topped with a slot for a real fiddle or banjo—winner’s choice—that’s crafted by local luthier Tom Barr, who runs a music store downtown in the old barbershop space where the famous Hill-Billies got their start. The region some call “the rooftop of Virginia” counts a half a dozen acclaimed instrument makers, in fact. Guitar god Wayne Henderson of nearby Rugby made Eric Clapton wait ten years for his Henderson, and many of the staff musicians at the Grand Ole Opry play guitars built by Galax luthier Jimmy Edmonds. “You’re dealing with a town where a good fourth of the population plays!” exclaimed Joe Wilson, the folklorist.
On Friday nights you can hear that music live on Blue Ridge Backroads, a WBRF FM radio program, or see it in person at the restored Rex Theater downtown. There’s a throwback diner called simply the Grill where the bill on most meals, no matter what you order, comes to exactly five dollars. An elderly black shoe cobbler named Slim is training Jorge, who runs the Hispanic barbershop next door, to do shoe repair so Jorge can take over Slim’s duties when he retires.
Still, 40 percent of Galax residents qualify for food stamps; two-thirds of the town’s schoolchildren are on free or reduced-rate lunches; and nearly a quarter of the population lives in poverty. “It’s terrible to admit this to a news reporter, but Galax has the fifth-highest crime rate in Virginia,” said Galax police chief Rick Clark, noting that Mexican drug cartels have a presence in the area. Galax is “out of sight, out of mind, and they can keep a low profile,” he said, and it’s also near two interstates, making it a prime staging area for distribution.
“People didn’t get rich here, but they were able to make a living, have a garden, and maybe raise their own pork,” Clark added. “Now the tragedy is, our best and brightest that used to stay here before don’t stay. Now you work for the city, the hospital, or Vaughan-Bassett Furniture, and that’s pretty much it.”
As Luper, the sawmiller, put it, “I guess we traded our jobs for somebody somewhere else in the world to have a better life, I don’t know.”
Wilson, the folklorist from the nearby former cotton-mill town of Fries, agrees. Named a Living Legend by the Library of Congress and a National Heritage Fellow by the National Endowment of the Arts, Wilson has never met John Bassett, who doesn’t socialize much in Galax beyond daily shop-talk lunches with his sons at the County Line Café, a blue-plate-lunch diner where he likes to think he’s paying homage to the many lunches his father and uncles had with Mr. J.D. (sans Miss Pokey’s after-lunch “naps”).
But as the creative genius behind several recent developments in and around Galax—the Crooked Road musical heritage tour, for instance—Wilson understands Appalachia’s place in the world better than most. And he believes
John Bassett’s boldness will be remembered for generations.
“The people who did these quick moves, they were looking at the bottom line in the next two or three years. But John had faith in the workers here. He had faith in these mountains and the trees that grow on them,” Wilson said. “Free trade really meant that no one was looking out for the little people.… He was bright enough to know that what was going on with [globalization profits] was just temporary, and our government was going along with it, and he had to nip some of that in the bud.”
As the folks in Bassett like to put it: Little John got the last word.
26
The Replacements
I want you to see what they do in Indonesia and explain to me why we can’t do that here no more.
—WANDA PERDUE, DISPLACED STANLEY FURNITURE WORKER
From Bassett to Martinsville to Galax, every Virginia furniture factory founded with the help of Mr. J.D. Bassett near U.S. Route 58 fell victim to the 58 virus except one: Vaughan-Bassett. Even Stanley Furniture, which hauled in the largest portion of antidumping duties by far—$80 million—closed its flagship Stanleytown plant at the end of 2010. Two years later, it moved its corporate office from Stanleytown to High Point, eliminating forty-five more local jobs and consolidating offices with its newly renovated showroom. (It maintains two Henry County warehouses, which together employ about seventy.)
Though it still imports adult furniture from Indonesia and Vietnam, Stanley adopted a new kind of blended strategy in 2011: At the same time it closed the Stanleytown plant, the company pumped $8 million in Byrd money into new equipment for its aging plant in Robbinsville, North Carolina, reshoring—or bringing back to the United States—its Young America children’s line. The change was prompted in part by a string of crib recalls that had roiled the industry, most involving Chinese imports (though Stanley’s biggest voluntary recall of cribs, involving its 2nd Nature Built to Grow cribs, were made in Slovenia).