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How United Furniture went from state-funded darling to coldly laying off 2,700 workers

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How United Furniture went from state-funded darling to coldly laying off 2,700 workers

United Furniture Industries — the Tupelo-based furnishings manufacturer that recently laid off its entire staff via email and text message – received more than $3 million dollars in taxpayer money through business incentive grants since 2009.

The furniture company regularly got sums every few years — ranging from $200,000 to $1.3 million — in exchange for the promise to create jobs.

It was the largest employer in Monroe County. Now, its owner is missing and its former employees are filing lawsuits and hunting for new jobs.

“It’s a disgrace is what it is,” Jackson-based attorney Phil Hearn told Mississippi Today. Hearn is leading a class-action lawsuit on behalf of hundreds of workers.

United was an anchor of the furniture manufacturing hub of Northeast Mississippi — among the dozens of companies benefitting from decades of tax breaks to do business in-state. The companys buildings in Lee County were free from local and state property taxes, another incentive perk. It also likely saved massive amounts of money on its payroll taxes as part of a job creation rebate program and tax credits from a special program for upholstery companies.

When then-Gov. Phil Bryant announced that United would get more than $1.3 million to support an expansion in 2013, he called the manufacturer “a valued business partner for the State of Mississippi.”

In 2015, the company got $500,000 more with similar fanfare. Then, $200,000 the next year and another promise of 100 new jobs. Both the most recent grants were awarded through the state’s “ACE” program – commonly referred to as “deal closing funds” when competition is fierce.

Every celebrated announcement touted jobs, partnerships and keeping Mississippians at work in the furniture industry.

But with one email to 2,700 employees overnight a few days before Thanksgiving, that long-standing partnership shattered. The company wasn’t just closing – it was already closed. No federally-mandated warning to employees that layoffs were coming. No announcement of a sale. No filing for bankruptcy.

Just closed.

Hearn said in his three decades as an attorney handling employee rights cases, he’s never seen anything like this: a total disregard for labor laws, no planning, and limited information available to workers.

“I’ve been with the company through several owners and names,” line worker Jeff Jones told the Daily Journal. “We’ve always bounced back. In the email they made it perfectly clear there’s no bouncing back from this.”

Jones worked for United Furniture for more than 30 years.

Hearn said the state’s history of supporting the company gave employees a sense of security that made the sudden collapse even more shocking.

“It can be difficult to evaluate some of these incentive programs for various reasons,” said State Economist Corey Miller. “A number of companies that get them get more than one incentive, and it’s difficult to untangle the impact of each one.”

Miller said in the case of United, the company’s sudden fall doesn’t mean the millions the state put up to support the company were for nothing.

“I don’t think they necessarily weren’t worth doing,” Miller said. “I haven’t evaluated the whole situation, but it’s possible because they were around for a while, people had jobs, that the state got some return on investment.”

United Furniture was created after a merger between three companies in 2000: Comfort Furniture, Parkhill Furniture and United Chair. Comfort Furniture, the leading of the three, was founded in Mississippi in 1983.

Over the 2010s, the company regularly received state-funded support in grants through the Mississippi Development Authority. In addition to grants, the company was also certified to participate in the state’s Advantage Jobs Incentive Program, which allows companies to have up to 90% of payroll taxes withheld for up to a decade dependent upon the number of jobs it created.

In 2020, the revenue department projected the total cost of the program would be about $18 million and covered a dozen companies in 10 counties – including in counties that were home to United facilities.

Another tax credit program, specific for upholstery companies such as United, allows them up to $2,000 job tax credit per position created since 2010 and covers up to 100% of their income tax liability.

But any details about if United – or any one company – took advantage of either programs and to what extent isn’t public, according to the state Department of Revenue.

By 2017, United had about 3,500 employees and facilities in Nettleton, Tupelo, Okolona, Sherman, Vardaman, Amory and out-of-state facilities in North Carolina and California. The company took over a Belden factory that belonged to a competitor, buying out the Lane brand for an undisclosed amount.

But in July of this year, United announced it was laying off 300 people and closed its Amory plant because it was turning the facility into a distribution warehouse. After the layoffs, the company still had 17 facilities (including one in Vietnam) and about 2,700 employees.

“Our team is committed to the long-term success of our company,” then-Chief Executive Officer Todd Evans said in a statement at the time. “That commitment requires right-sizing at the present time. We are confident that the product, sales, and operational plans that we have established will provide for a successful future.’’

But that success didn’t come.

Miller, the state economist, said the United situation seems like more of an outlier — not an indication Northeast Mississippi’s furniture industry as a whole is in danger.

There has been some slow down industry-wide, Miller said. Companies aren’t seeing the same high demands for home furnishings they were during the pandemic. But most companies aren’t at a crisis level.

The larger economic impacts to the Monroe and Lee counties will depend upon how quickly workers are in new jobs, Miller said.

Nettleton-based furniture manufacturing company Homestretch Furniture hired 15 former United workers at a recent job fair. Ashley Furniture, another company with local manufacturing, has also recruited workers.

MDA declined to make any comments specific to United or its past grants, but Deputy Director Laura Hipp said in a statement that the state agency will “work with local economic development partners on how the needs of the area can be supported.”

Hearn, the attorney, said he’s seen entire families devastated: five brothers who all worked for United, a mother and two daughters – one pregnant – now without health insurance.

His clients largely fall into two categories: eager for another furniture job because it’s all they know, or eager for a change because they’re terrified the same thing will happen at another plant.

His clients range from executive-suite workers to line workers and truck drivers.

“They all have one thing in common,” he said. “They’re scared to death.”

Had United followed Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) laws, it would have given employees 60 days notice before the massive layoffs.

The decision to shutter the company came from Stage Capital LLC, the company’s owners. Head of Stage Capital, David Belford, has been missing since the email closing the company went out.

Hearn said he’s heard company rumors the millionaire – or possible billionaire – ran off to Paris.

United is now facing three class-action lawsuits – which a judge could roll into one case – that accuses the company of failing to follow the WARN Act and still owing workers their last week’s paycheck.

“I’ve never seen anything so callous,” Hearn said.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Mississippi Today

On this day in 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois urged active resistance to racist policies

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mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-27 07:00:00

April 27, 1903

W.E.B. Du Bois by James E. Purdy in 1907 from the National Portrait Gallery.

W.E.B. Du Bois, in his book, “The Souls of Black Folk,” called for active resistance to racist policies: “We have no right to sit silently by while the inevitable seeds are sown for a harvest of disaster to our children, black and white.” 

He described the tension between being Black and being an American: “One ever feels his twoness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” 

He criticized Washington’s “Atlanta Compromise” speech. Six years later, Du Bois helped found the NAACP and became the editor of its monthly magazine, The Crisis. He waged protests against the racist silent film “The Birth of a Nation” and against lynchings of Black Americans, detailing the 2,732 lynchings between 1884 and 1914. 

In 1921, he decried Harvard University’s decisions to ban Black students from the dormitories as an attempt to renew “the Anglo-Saxon cult, the worship of the Nordic totem, the disenfranchisement of Negro, Jew, Irishman, Italian, Hungarian, Asiatic and South Sea Islander — the world rule of Nordic white through brute force.” 

In 1929, he debated Lothrop Stoddard, a proponent of scientific racism, who also happened to belong to the Ku Klux Klan. The Chicago Defender’s front page headline read, “5,000 Cheer W.E.B. DuBois, Laugh at Lothrup Stoddard.” 

In 1949, the FBI began to investigate Du Bois as a “suspected Communist,” and he was indicted on trumped-up charges that he had acted as an agent of a foreign state and had failed to register. The government dropped the case after Albert Einstein volunteered to testify as a character witness. 

Despite the lack of conviction, the government confiscated his passport for eight years. In 1960, he recovered his passport and traveled to the newly created Republic of Ghana. Three years later, the U.S. government refused to renew his passport, so Du Bois became a citizen of Ghana. He died on Aug. 27, 1963, the eve of the March on Washington.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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Mississippi Today

Jim Hood’s opinion provides a roadmap if lawmakers do the unthinkable and can’t pass a budget

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mississippitoday.org – @BobbyHarrison9 – 2025-04-27 06:00:00

On June 30, 2009, Sam Cameron, the then-executive director of the Mississippi Hospital Association, held a news conference in the Capitol rotunda to publicly take his whipping and accept his defeat.

Cameron urged House Democrats, who had sided with the Hospital Association, to accept the demands of Republican Gov. Haley Barbour to place an additional $90 million tax on the state’s hospitals to help fund Medicaid and prevent the very real possibility of the program and indeed much of state government being shut down when the new budget year began in a few hours. The impasse over Medicaid and the hospital tax had stopped all budget negotiations.

Barbour watched from a floor above as Cameron publicly admitted defeat. Cameron’s decision to swallow his pride was based on a simple equation. He told news reporters, scores of lobbyists and health care advocates who had set up camp in the Capitol as midnight on July 1 approached that, while he believed the tax would hurt Mississippi hospitals, not having a Medicaid budget would be much more harmful.

Just as in 2009, the Legislature ended the 2025 regular session earlier this month without a budget agreement and will have to come back in special session to adopt a budget before the new fiscal year begins on July 1. It is unlikely that the current budget rift between the House and Senate will be as dramatic as the 2009 standoff when it appeared only hours before the July 1 deadline that there would be no budget. But who knows what will result from the current standoff? After all, the current standoff in many ways seems to be more about political egos than policy differences on the budget.

The fight centers around multiple factors, including:

  • Whether legislation will be passed to allow sports betting outside of casinos.
  • Whether the Senate will agree to a massive projects bill to fund local projects throughout the state.
  • Whether leaders will overcome hard feelings between the two chambers caused by the House’s hasty final passage of a Senate tax cut bill filled with typos that altered the intent of the bill without giving the Senate an opportunity to fix the mistakes.
  • Whether members would work on a weekend at the end of the session. The Senate wanted to, the House did not.

It is difficult to think any of those issues will rise to the ultimate level of preventing the final passage of a budget when push comes to shove.

But who knows? What we do know is that the impasse in 2009 created a guideline of what could happen if a budget is not passed.

It is likely that parts, though not all, of state government will shut down if the Legislature does the unthinkable and does not pass a budget for the new fiscal year beginning July 1.

An official opinion of the office of Attorney General Jim Hood issued in 2009 said if there is no budget passed by the Legislature, those services mandated in the Mississippi Constitution, such as a public education system, will continue.

According to the Hood opinion, other entities, such as the state’s debt, and court and federal mandates, also would be funded. But it is likely that there will not be funds for Medicaid and many other programs, such as transportation and aspects of public safety that are not specifically listed in the Mississippi Constitution.

The Hood opinion reasoned that the Mississippi Constitution is the ultimate law of the state and must be adhered to even in the absence of legislative action. Other states have reached similar conclusions when their legislatures have failed to act, the AG’s opinion said.

As is often pointed out, the opinion of the attorney general does not carry the weight of law. It serves only as a guideline, though Gov. Tate Reeves has relied on the 2009 opinion even though it was written by the staff of Hood, who was Reeves’ opponent in the contentious 2019 gubernatorial campaign.

But if the unthinkable ever occurs and the Legislature goes too far into a new fiscal year without adopting a budget, it most likely will be the courts — moreso than an AG’s opinion — that ultimately determine if and how state government operates.

In 2009 Sam Cameron did not want to see what would happen if a budget was not adopted. It also is likely that current political leaders do not want to see the results of not having a budget passed before July 1 of this year.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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Mississippi Today

1964: Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was formed

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mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-26 07:00:00

April 26, 1964

Aaron Henry testifies before the Credentials Committee at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.

Civil rights activists started the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to challenge the state’s all-white regular delegation to the Democratic National Convention. 

The regulars had already adopted this resolution: “We oppose, condemn and deplore the Civil Rights Act of 1964 … We believe in separation of the races in all phases of our society. It is our belief that the separation of the races is necessary for the peace and tranquility of all the people of Mississippi, and the continuing good relationship which has existed over the years.” 

In reality, Black Mississippians had been victims of intimidation, harassment and violence for daring to try and vote as well as laws passed to disenfranchise them. As a result, by 1964, only 6% of Black Mississippians were permitted to vote. A year earlier, activists had run a mock election in which thousands of Black Mississippians showed they would vote if given an opportunity. 

In August 1964, the Freedom Party decided to challenge the all-white delegation, saying they had been illegally elected in a segregated process and had no intention of supporting President Lyndon B. Johnson in the November election. 

The prediction proved true, with white Mississippi Democrats overwhelmingly supporting Republican candidate Barry Goldwater, who opposed the Civil Rights Act. While the activists fell short of replacing the regulars, their courageous stand led to changes in both parties.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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