Kansas City, Mo — Workers at a small greeting-card assembly plant briefly stopped folding and gluing Monday as President Bush told them why his proposed tax cut would help employers like theirs.
Occasionally, some of Bajan Industries Inc.'s 100 employees joined in the more enthusiastic applause of about 300 invited guests seated in their midst.
President Bush, left, and Elson Seale, owner of Bajan Industries, talk before Bush's address about his tax-cut plan at Bajan Industries in Kansas City, Mo.
Others were unmoved by the president's remarks about the value to small businesses of his proposed $1.6 trillion tax cut or simply did not understand them. Many of the workers are immigrants from Latin America and Africa and speak little or no English.
"It really didn't concern me," said Jacqueline Williams, who has worked at Bajan for four years. "The speech was nice, but it didn't mean anything to the really, really small people like us."
Yvette Willingham, a 32-year-old mother of five, was moved to applaud when Bush spoke of his plan to double the child tax credit to $1,000.
"It was worth listening to," Willingham said following the 20-minute, late-morning talk. "But I'm ready to go home" for lunch, she added.
Bush was introduced by Elson Seale, the former professional soccer player who founded Bajan Industries four years ago and proudly counts many former welfare recipients among its employees. The company is chiefly a subcontractor for Hallmark Cards Inc., also of Kansas City.
Seale, 45, is also president and CEO of a much larger company, Packing Solutions Inc., in neighboring Johnson County, Kan.
But he is not, he said Sunday, active in either Republican or Democratic politics, and he was uncertain why the company had been chosen as the site for a presidential visit. He said he was keeping an open mind on Bush's tax proposals.
"I wish you all the best of luck with your tax plan in the Senate," Seale told Bush on Monday, prompting chuckles from the crowd. "I'm sure you'll need it."
Whatever his questions about the plan, Seale was certain the exposure Bush's visit would bring could only be helpful to Bajan Industries. Many of the company's employees and other officials agreed.
"It draws attention to the work we do here in this business," Tomas Hernandez, who arrived in Kansas City three years ago from the Mexican state of Durango, said in Spanish. "It's good for small factories that he came here."
General manager Maurice King, a former 25-year Hallmark employee who helped develop Bajan Industries' business plan, called the visit "great for the company, for our employees, for Kansas City."
"The president gets to talk about his tax plan, and we get some exposure," King said.
Bajan Industries stands out partly for the ethnic diversity of its employees, King added.
"If you wanted to see a small business that looks like a rainbow, you'd want to look at Bajan," he said. "We've got Caucasians, African-Americans, Mexicans, Somalians, people from Honduras, from other African countries. Many speak English, some don't."
Seale, a native of Barbados and longtime U.S. citizen he was a three-time soccer All-American at Philadelphia College of Textiles in the mid-1970s was among the city's minority business owners who saw the possibilities for society in the Welfare Reform Act of 1996.
Many of Bajan Industries' employees were matched with the company through a metropolitan-wide private, nonprofit corporation that helps find jobs for unemployed and underemployed residents.
To some business people, he said, the end result of economic development efforts is "one or two individuals really profiting."
"In this case, I can clearly say that 100 people are benefiting," he said, indicating with a wave the assembly tables lining the plant floor.
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