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Out to Lunch with

John St. John, manufacturer

    In this series of interviews, I talk to people in Summit County about how they feel and think about politics.
     This week I had coffee at Inxpot, in Keystone, with John St. John, a Keystone resident who has been in the furniture manufacturing business all his life - he's third generation. He married his wife, Linda, in 1975 in Vail, lived in Memphis but would spend Christmas and holidays in Vail for many years until they discovered Keystone in 1981. He moved there permanently a few years later, and his twin sons graduated from Summit High.

Talty: What do you do in the furniture manufacturing business?
St. John: My partner of 32 years, he does the hard part. As I oft say, he runs the factory and I run my mouth. I'm the marketing and sales end of it. We have one domestic plant in North Carolina, and have relationships with five factories in China. We have a partnership with a factory in Mexico, Indonesia, and one in Thailand. The way I tell people "fish where the fish are," and that's the price level where we are. We make inexpensive furniture.

Talty: Do you think it's a problem that too many jobs are going overseas?

St. John: I don't know if it's a problem. It, of course, begets headlines. We can buy these clothes (we have on) and furniture and everything else at still a reasonable price - value - value is the key - irrespective of where it's manufactured. It's a metamorphosis at all times in every industry, and we're not at the end of our manufacturing revolutions. We bring parts from most of these countries and assemble the parts with domestic raw materials in our Carolina plant, again, to give the consumer the price advantage.

Talty: The materials come from the U.S.?
St. John: They don't have a good oak for furniture manufacture and they are harvested in the South and shipped as trees, be it to China or be it any place else. The end of it still is the consumer. The consumer is the winner. No different than automobiles and horse and buggies. That displaced many, many people, but they were absorbed into a different side of it.

Talty: Is this offshore manufacturing creating new, different jobs?
St. John: I think that new jobs are created in new industries that may not have anything to do with what someone did before. The horse and buggy people that went out of business where absorbed into the auto industry, if they so desired. The technology of the horse and buggy had nothing to do with automobile manufacturing. It's very political. It's fashionable to stand up as a politician, or on a local level, and say I'm going to save your job.

Talty: Even if no one needs to be doing that job?
St. John: That's right. With England, they lost the competitive edge because they continued to shelter manufacturing and jobs that were of no consequence in the true scheme of things.

Talty: Labor was protecting the coal and steel industries?
St. John: It doesn't matter which side, Tory, Whigs, Labor, whoever is in power, it makes political currency to say 'I'm going to save your job,' or 'I'm going to grow your job,' or 'I'm going to cause jobs,' or 'I'm going to bring in industry.'

Forget the boom-and-bust of Silicon Valley; we created a whole new industry that only half of us understood. And people were putting money on red or black; they didn't know what (these companies) were. That is an example of where it's going. Is tech going to supplant manufacturing in this country? I doubt that. But what will happen is simple: as we were to the last century, and the British were to the century before, China will dominate this century.

You start with a 125 million people and you go from there. In my mind, communism - now roughly a 70-year aberration - and its old goats will finally disappear. China is going to be formidable. It's formidable right now. They're quick learners, they're smarter than we are, they invented everything from gunpowder to spaghetti to bureaucracy to whatever, and they're disciplined. They're going to have it all. At some point, the U.S. and China are going to collide and I hope it is not militarily. Right now, we are their market, but it's politically fashionable to bash China. After the election, whoever wins will have some rapproprochment with China, and say "it was all politics; that's all."

Talty: I think one of the problems Americans have with China is that we know we've improved the environmental standards since the 60s? And shouldn't we ask the rest of the world to do the same?
St. John: I don't know. The Kyoto Treaty, if it had been exercised - which Clinton had enough sense to finesse and this administration has had the sense to finesse because it would have stopped this country dead - it would have put me out of business.

Talty: Why? The CO2 standards?
St. John: A furniture factory is a bomb ready to go off at any second. We now have water-based finishes so that we're not spewing solids into the atmosphere, but everything else we do is (flammable) ... a bomb. I've been involved with a few that have burned to the ground. And the standards that would have been imposed against my industry, and steel, it would have shut this country down.

Talty: If we make smart rules, won't people come up with ways to get keep going in spite of the rules imposed?
St. John: Smart people may not make the rules, oft times they don't. Political people make the rules with an agenda.

Talty: Some bad rules have been made?
St. John: There are bad rules being made every day, any place you want to go. Interpretation of what's going on is not something for which any one person or group has the answers. Anytime you have something as sensitive as Kyoto it is almost an end-sum game. In order for the people that want Kyoto and its punitive measures to win, than someone else has to lose. Al Gore and his father from Tennessee - he who could not carry his own state, which is certainly the banner he needs to carry - is either intellectually dishonest or just a politician. In some way that means you're capable of doing or saying anything. I don't know if he understood what he was talking about in most of his environmental pronouncements. I'm not against prudent measures, we can't cut down every tree in the county, we can't pave it like a parking lot, we can't obstruct rivers forever, pollute forever. Once upon a time, I used to smoke cigarettes. I haven't smoked cigarettes for a long, long time. There is such a give-and-take in the whole thing, and Kyoto was no give and take.

Talty: Bush's idea is to make changes voluntary. If environment policies are voluntary, your competitor may not have to change?
St. John: Bush is a politician, too. Kyoto didn't get ratified when Clinton was there. He knew where his bread was buttered.

Talty: What should we do about global warming? St. John: Let me refer you to Fortune Magazine from Feb. 6, page 100. It's maybe the most awakening article I've read about climate change. (St. John said the current global warming is part of a cycle that began long before there were cars and factories.) To some degree, the effect is acerbated by what we've done as humans. We didn't start it, nor can we stop it.

Talty: We can't really reverse the global warming, what should we be doing?
St. John: From a consumer of fossil fuels, I think we are sitting on a powder keg. We need to develop something else just as soon as we possibly can, some alternate source of energy. Sixty percent of our net oil needs are coming from an unstable region that we have no control over. We need to do something about that right now. We can't ignore it. Many of my friends choose to either deny it, or ignore it. I don't choose to think that it is like a light switch that we can turn on or off.

In my mind the easiest thing to do is — for God's sake if we can put a vehicle on Mars — surely to goodness, we can find an alternate source of energy. It may cost more. At the end of the Civil War, the only source of energy was whale oil and they punched a hole in Pennsylvania, and out came something that would combust (coal). And lo, the end of old whale oil. And we need to do the same with this, and fossil fuel will be gone. If we want to spend the money, to send people to the moon and then to Mars, and beyond, let's first fix here, and the biggest thing I see is energy and a renewable source of energy that we can trust, that we can own.

It doesn't have anything to do with politics; it shouldn't. Fix it. We've got the money, we damn sure got the brains. We can find something that will burn clean, and is renewable. Approaching fossil fuels from the standpoint of what it is costing us to continue using them - what they're spewing into the air - to clean them up, which they can, would make gas cost $10 a gallon. Then, the next thing we would need to do is make cars that are efficient. Hell, it's business. It just makes sense.

Talty: And because it costs us so much to drive, we'd start buying locally?
St. John: Yeah. Or we start making fuel out of water. But Kyoto, the people that I read, can't get the politics out of it. Somebody's got to win and somebody's got to lose. If you notice, there is no in between. They're either greedy manufacturers like myself, or they're tree huggers. There's a big in between. That's where we need to get.
      —Feb. 11, 2004, Summit Times