By Staff
When Jo Flock walked into my office on Thursday wearing a Dick DeVos for Governor baseball cap, I knew I was in trouble.
"I'm wearing this cap because I want you to know why I'm here to talk to you today," she said.
I would have known even without the cap. I've been in trouble with Jo before. It doesn't take a cap for me to know it.
In fact, I'd been expecting her.
Jo Flock, among many other things, is a political activist and an avid Republican. I've admired her for a long time because she's one of those rare people who doesn't merely talk the talk, but walks the walk – so to speak.
Jo was disappointed by my reference in a recent column to the outsourcing of jobs by DeVos while running Amway.
Jo said I'm dead wrong about that. Dick DeVos, who is a Republican candidate for Michigan governor, was president of Alticor Inc., the parent company of Amway, until 2002.
Michigan Democrats claim that during DeVos' tenure as president, Alticor made deep cuts in its Michigan work force while making a $100-million investment in global expansion, according to a Detroit News story.
In the Detroit New story, Steve Van Andel, Alticor chairman, said the company today is doing business in 57 countries and 80 percent of its business is outside the United States.
I told Jo I would be happy to publish a letter to the editor if she wanted to express her opinion on DeVos or anything else I'd written. She didn't want to write a letter. She wanted me to listen.
"That's not why I'm here," she said. "I want you to know what I know about Dick DeVos. I want you to know about my personal experience with the DeVos family." Jo Flock has been an Amway distributor for 35 years and has known "Rich and Jay," which is how she refers to Amway founders Richard DeVos and Jay Van Andel, for that long.
Rich DeVos is Dick's father.
Jo told me not one U.S. job has been lost as a result of Amway's international expansion. She said there has been no outsourcing of jobs, as Democrats claim. She said when the company expanded into China, one of the demands of the Chinese government was that all products sold in China must be manufactured there.
That's why Alticor began manufacturing Amway products in China, she said.
"Not one Amway product manufactured in China has been sold in the U.S.," Jo said. "In fact, Amway created 350 new jobs in the U.S. when it began doing business in China."
Jo Flock can be a persuasive woman. When her son was graduating from St. Joseph High School in South Bend, Ind., she wrote to Rich DeVos and asked him to speak at graduation. He accepted. However, Jo was contacted soon after by one of his assistants who told her he couldn't make it because graduation was on a Friday night and Friday night was a night he always spent with his family.
Jo, being one who doesn't often take no for an answer, wrote to DeVos and told him how important it was for those young people to hear what he had to say about America and success.
Rich DeVos traveled to South Bend that Friday night and spoke to her son's graduating class. Later, she would learn that to do so, Rich had to miss the baby shower for his first grandchild – Dick DeVos' first child.
Did Dick DeVos turn his back on Michigan and outsource jobs to China when he was running Amway?
Jo Flock doesn't see it that way.
Many, like me, think creating thousands of jobs in China at the same time during which you cut 1,400 jobs in Michigan is supporting unfair trade practices – the very practices that are taking ever-increasing numbers of jobs away from American workers and handing them to workers in other countries – like China.
Like many issues, I guess it's all depends on your point of view.
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