A shortage of workers in Vietnam — a huge beneficiary of the U.S. trade war with China — is getting severe enough that some furniture makers are now scouting Cambodia and Bangladesh for factories, according to one industry chief executive.
Labor rates in Vietnam are rising and workers are getting increasingly scarce, said Clarence Smith, CEO of Haverty Furniture Cos., which uses Asian factories to make its company-branded products.
And even though Asian suppliers continue to source much of the timber they use from the Appalachian region of the U.S., the manufacturing of wood furniture “is not coming back to the United States,” Smith said in an interview.
