Patriots

Here's an interesting thing. I'm watching CBS Sunday Morning on March 4. There's a story about a business, founded by a couple. It's a furniture business. It's been around about 25 years.

This couple have their furniture manufactured in North Carolina. They have day care for the employees. They have an indoor walking track. They have a gourmet cafeteria. This is not a tech company. This is a furniture manufacturer.

The gorillas of industry have outsourced, and outsourced, and outsourced some more to find the cheapest, lowest skilled employee in some far off land, once they determine that the low income areas of the US are still too high to pay.

What this company has done is pretty impressive.

What they've done in their relationship is even more impressive. They were a romantic couple as well as business partners for a couple decades, but amicably split on the romantic side of things. In fact, one bought the other out of their house, with the seller pricing low because of the buyer's known affection for the property. Each is now married to someone else, but they still run the company together, quite successfully.

This is a business run with the interests of not just its owners in mind, but its employees as well. This is a relationship run on cooperation and accomplishment rather than acrimony and recrimination. This is how busniesses should be run and how personal relationships should be handled.

Too bad their business is in a state that wouldn't recognize either of their current marriages. This former couple and current business partners is Bob Williams and Mitchell Gold, a furniture manufacturer known straightforwardly as Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams.

Now, some may argue that this business can provide the benefits it does because the furniture is high end. True. The furniture is high end. But, the profit margins of the large manufacturers of the US are also high end. Look at the bonuses paid the executives, not to mention other perks. If these businesses employed Americans at a livable wage with some fairly simple benefits rather than providing rapacious returns to a select few, the jobs wouldn't be sent overseas. Jobs overseas is just a way of providing more for the pockets of the 1% while enfeebling the 99%.

More companies should be modeled after the operations of this couple, exemplars of American business succeeding for both the owners and the employees, despite their second class citizenship in the state where their factory is located.