JACKSON, Mich. — Anita-Maria Quillen blended a strawberry-banana shake, tucked high heels into a Louis Vuitton bag and fired off last-minute requests at her little boys and their sitter.þþShe stepped out her door in flip-flops, where a waiting Chevy Tahoe would take her to a business fair near Detroit. The auto parts company Ms. Quillen has owned and run for six years, Diversified Engineering & Plastics, was profitable, but only because she had aggressively cut costs. She had whittled the payroll to 78 employees from 130. Now, the most important thing was to bring in new orders — what she called “working on the business, instead of in the business.”þþMs. Quillen, 35, belongs to a much-mythologized class in American life and politics: small-business owners. Politicians heap praise on them, campaigning in their factories and extolling their enterprises as engines of good jobs and good wages. President Trump’s election lifted their hopes for a resurgence.þþBut with the president’s economic agenda stalled in Congress, a more complicated reality was taking hold, especially in Ms. Quillen’s industry. After several door-busting years, auto sales had dropped every month in 2017. The slowdown had caught up to Ms. Quillen’s company, crimping her ability to contribute to the blue-collar revival that Michiganders had hoped for when they backed a Republican president for the first time in 28 years.þþTo own a small manufacturing business is to shoulder so many worries you hope your children find an easier career, and to realize how little the airy pronouncements of politicians describe your reality. Ms. Quillen, who voted for Mr. Trump, complies with the Affordable Care Act, but finds that employees who live paycheck to paycheck refuse to buy insurance at $150 a month. When her congressman visited D.E.P. and assumed government regulations must be a burden, she assured him, no, that wasn’t her problem.þþWhat is a problem — what threatened her profitability and the nearly 80 paychecks she signs — was maintaining her niche in the auto industry, the backbone of Midwest manufacturing.þþCarmakers are “constantly pushing costs down, costs down, costs down,” Ms. Quillen said from the passenger seat of the Tahoe, speeding east. “But meanwhile people want $15 an hour for minimum wage.”þþHer 160,000-square-foot plant is filled with hulking machines that inject 500-degree molten plastic into steel molds. The resulting products — items like mirror brackets and window frames — go into Fords, Chevrolets and Harley-Davidson motorcycles.þþBut lately some of those machines have been idle. Her company had lost $3 million of work orders as of June this year. With unsold cars and trucks piling up on dealers’ lots, the big carmakers were getting ready to shut down their assembly lines for a few weeks over the summer. In a chain reaction, Ms. Quillen’s plant, too, scheduled a weeklong furlough in July.þþThe business fair she was attending, at a hotel in Dearborn, Mich., promised her the vital chance to meet buyers from Toyota and Fiat Chrysler, in the hopes of bringing new business in the door.þþAs a young female entrepreneur, Ms. Quillen prided herself on having the toughness to make a factory run efficiently. “I have a more challenging time with the more social aspect of things,” she acknowledged.þþBut she could not avoid putting herself out there forever. “I need to be out meeting people, establishing those relationships, getting those potential work opportunities in the door,” she said, as if giving herself a pep talk.þþTurning to her administrative assistant, who was driving, she confided that a big D.E.P. customer seemed to be preparing to shift its injection molding work to China. “I’ve asked them point-blank, ‘Have you guys decided to source this somewhere else?’ ” Ms. Quillen said. “They told me no.”þþShe didn’t believe it. She had sources in the company. “If that’s their choice, I understand,” she said. “It’s a business decision. But don’t lie to my face. Man up. It’s not like I’m 12 and I told you I don’t want to be your girlfriend anymore.”
Source: NY Times
