A Leeds businessman steering an 80-year-old company has been waging a one-man fight against Chinese manufacturers, one case at a time, over the past two decades in an effort to save his business.
Milton Magnus, president of M&B Hangers, was the subject of a story by The Wall Street Journal about his spending twenty years involved in fighting what he says are Chinese manufacturers attempting to circumvent tariffs designed to protect his business sector.
“It’s been years of struggling, of trying different things, to hopefully save our business,” Magnus told the paper.
M&B Hangers is one of the last remaining U.S.-based manufacturers of steel-wire clothes hangers. It was founded by Magnus’ grandfather and Roy Brekle back in 1943. The two formerly worked for Pepsi but left to form a company to recondition used bottle caps and sell them back to the soft-drink industry. They switched to steel hangers when a drycleaner told them they were in short supply because of the war.
Milton III took over for his father, Milton Jr., after his retired in the 1980s. But the rise of Chinese trade began to eat into the family business.
Magnus first testified on Chinese hangers in 2003 before a federal agency analyzing trade issues.
The U.S. Commerce Department responded in 2008, imposing duties of up to 187% on imports of Chinese hangers. Magnus had filed an “antidumping” case, alleging that Chinese manufacturers were exporting hangers for less than what they would sell for in China.
However, that was only the beginning. Not long after, Chinese-made hangers began appearing in U.S. ports, shipped from Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand, and other Asian countries.
Magnus hired private investigators to look into the shipments, the paper reported. Congress later passed the Enforce and Protect Act, which allows claims of tariff evasion with U.S. Customs and Border Protection against American hanger importers.
“It’s like a roller coaster. We file a trade case, demand for us goes way up, then there’s a new way of circumvention and demand goes down,” Magnus told the Journal.
Magnus gets his steel wire largely from Illinois, Texas and Oklahoma and pays workers anywhere from $15 to $23 an hour. The plant employs 50 people, about half of the workers it had at its peak. It also produces roughly half as many hangers.
