Loot of the World?

  Don’t laugh it off. By some of the classic economic and social definitions, you might be called a trafficker in human misery, or a sleek freebooter, or an environmental pirate. People you don’t know today may be facing your shop with picket signs and buckets of paint tomorrow.
  And all you wanted to do was make countertops and see customers smile.
  Here’s the good news: Protesters aren’t heading for your location any time soon, and probably never will. The bad news is that you still have that initial question: Are you an exploiter?
  This will not be one of those pseudo-introspective accounts designed to ultimately make you feel guilty about your work. Wherever and whenever you’re reading this, you’re not in the mood to have some guy drive you into depression for something you enjoy.
  You don’t fit the mold of the evil, greedy, pitiless person who values profit over human values. But, in admiring all those slabs and tiles of beautiful stone that roll through the shop, it’s worth considering how it ends up at your loading door.
  Right now, we’re experiencing boom times in dimensional stone. Part of that stems from the tremendous selection that’s available, and the diverse base of countries that offer any stone you can desire. It’s also a changing base, as shown in the Import Trends articles we run twice a year (including this issue).
  How this happened wasn’t through a technological breakthrough or multitudes of granite prospectors finding rich strikes. Go through the list of countries becoming the largest suppliers of stone here, and you’ll find names that usually got the tag of the Third World when there was the United States (and military partners), the Soviet Union (and military partners) and essentially everyone else.
  Now, the correct term might be the world’s developing economies, and that’s where you’ll find the active quarries: Brazil, India, Turkey, Zimbabwe and others. Today, instead of the stone going elsewhere to be worked, much of the production comes straight to the United States.
  In other countries, stone is going in raw or block form from an old stone partner and coming out slabbed and polished from a developing country. The prime example is China; for example, massive amounts of Baltic Brown granite are quarried in Finland, but the blocks head to the far side of the globe to make the slabs for the United States and other countries.
  It’s the material coming from developing economies that’s fueling the growth in the U.S. dimensional-stone industry, and the main attraction is price. Factoring inflation into the equation, stone is cheaper now than it was in the late 1990s.
  And here’s where you need to stop and ask another question: How did that happen? Did someone cut out the middleman and pass the savings along?
  In plain truth, yes. That middleman isn’t one person, or a cartel, or a country. It’s an economic reality: cheap labor.
   It’s a simple economic fact that it costs less for stone to be worked in these places before it goes into containers, onto freighters, through ports and eventually into your shop. The stone you receive isn’t something forced from the ground under the crack of a whip. But it’s not the cool, automated, OSHA-guarded conditions you’re used to in the United States, either.
  And, you’re using a natural resource – one that’s not going to replenish in an eon or so at least – with people getting wages you can’t fathom. The knee doesn’t need to jerk very far before someone could cry exploitation.
  The answer to this for me, though, came from an odd byproduct of the communications revolution: podcasts. The new rage is to download broadcasts through the Internet, which is how I came across a Chinese trade official and his comments on a program called From Our Own Correspondent from the BBC’s Radio 4.
  The program concerned a dispute over importing Chinese textiles to Europe, and the cries that the cheaper goods were unfair competition. To which the Chinese trade official responded: Hey, we didn’t invent free trade. You (as in Europe and the United States) did in dealing with us for years.
  Developing countries now use cheap labor because it’s what they have to compete. They want the rich economic status enjoyed by us, and that labor force is what they can use.
  With stone, developing countries also have a resource that, while it’s not exactly replenished immediately, can easily supply the world through this millennium with known reserves.
  The fuel, though, is cheap labor. It’s what my Volga German grandfather had a century ago, working his way across the Atlantic Ocean and across the United States until he found a home in the farmland of northern Colorado. He spent his capital early, ending up disabled in a wheelchair and dead before he was 60.
  He didn’t feel exploited. He worked better to make things better for his sons, one of whom became a skilled worker in construction. And the son wanted something better for his children, including the guy writing this column. You improve by using what you have.
  Those developing countries, and their workers, will do the same. As they do better, their economies will prosper. You’ll also see stone become not-so-cheap as those developing countries exercise their muscle in good, old-fashioned capitalism.
  Exploitation? Not hardly. The better life isn’t just the American Dream; it’s the Brazilian Dream, the Turkish Dream, the Chinese dream, everyone’s dream. You’re part of it. And that should bring some satisfaction to that face in the mirror.

This article first appeared in the October 2005 print edition of Stone Business. ©2005 Western Business Media Inc.