Furniture companies thin out

A North Carolina town is hit hard by the loss of jobs to China.

McClatchy Newspapers

MARTINSVILLE, Va. — For nearly 100 years, the furniture industry powered the economy in this struggling town in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Now it’s dying.

Martinsville’s decline from a secure working-class town to a fading industrial shell is a familiar story in scores of other American cities as the downside of globalization and trade policies takes a toll on the nation’s manufacturing base.

Foreign competition, mainly from China, has trimmed more than 120,000 furniture industry jobs nationwide since 2000. That’s about a third of the industry’s U.S. workforce, said industry analyst Jerry Epperson.

Nowhere, though, has the ax fallen harder than it has in Martinsville and surrounding Henry County, Va., where the stubborn gummy, red clay soil has become a graveyard of idled and abandoned furniture factories.

Hooker Furniture closed its Martinsville plant last year, eliminating 280 jobs. Ten miles or so up the road in Bassett, Bassett Furniture Industries shuttered its fourth local plant in six years last June, eliminating another 280 jobs. About 250 more jobs were lost in December, when Stanley Furniture converted its Martinsville factory into a warehouse. The nearby Ridgeway Furniture plant near the North Carolina border closed its doors the same month, eliminating 70 jobs.

The exodus of thousands of jobs in the furniture and apparel industries has left Martinsville, a town of 16,000 in southern Virginia, with the state’s highest unemployment rate, 11.9 percent in February. Henry County was sixth in the state at 8.1 percent.

If a severe national recession plunges the area’s sinking economy even lower, the handful of furniture companies still operating here could face more cuts and closings. That’s bad news for an isolated region where jobs already are scarce and many workers are poorly educated and have few marketable skills.

The economic damage is usually measured in lost jobs and dollars, but the toll on individual lives is too often overlooked. In Martinsville, where generations of family members worked in the furniture factories, the suffering is palpable.

“If I was 20 or 30, it wouldn’t bother me so bad, but I’m 53,” said Lynn Lawson, who lost her customer service job when Ridgeway Furniture closed its doors in December. She’s been looking for work ever since, but she’s been forced to raid her 401(k) retirement savings to make ends meet.

“When you get to my age, you think, ‘I’m gonna be here forever, ’till I either retire or die,’” Lawson said. “But now there’s no way that anyone can save for retirement, and that’s what really concerns me. What will I do for retirement?”

The worst may be yet to come, because the nation’s economic woes are a perfect wrecking ball for what’s left of the domestic furniture industry, which is based mainly in North Carolina and southern Virginia.

The housing slowdown has hit hard because some 20 percent of U.S. furniture sales are for homes purchased within 18 months. Tighter credit has also made it harder for buyers to finance furniture purchases, while sagging consumer confidence has made buyers wary of big-ticket items. One industry newsletter estimates that retail furniture sales fell 7.5 percent in 2007.

“We are a deferrable purchase [industry] that is dependent upon consumer confidence, housing activity, discretionary income and other factors. And we’re one of the first things that gets put off when the consumer feels economically strained,” said Epperson, a managing partner of Mann, Armistead & Epperson, an investment banking firm in Richmond, Va.

Local leaders have had some success luring new industries to the area, including plastic manufacturers and food processors. The Chamber of Commerce also is trying to attract more retirement services, tourism and back-office operations such as telemarketing and call centers. NASCAR’s venerable half-mile Martinsville Speedway, which ran its first race on July 4, 1948, also is being used to attract more auto racing businesses.

But the new jobs aren’t coming fast enough to keep pace with the ones that are being lost.

North Carolina’s furniture industry has fared better than Martinsville’s because it’s more diversified.