Special Report: Jobs in an evolving economy: Ex-textile workers try to weave new life – But most options are in low-paying service sector

The old mill town is searching for silver linings and grasping at threads.

When a textile factory in Kannapolis closed this summer, wiping out 1,571 jobs here in a single day, the laid-off workers felt a sense of panic. They needed jobs. They needed reassurance.

The Idaho Statesman

City Manager Michael Mahaney, who in July had likened his town´s jobless situation to an emergency room triage, predicted good things for Kannapolis a few months later.

“People are maybe just going to have to start commuting” to Charlotte, N.C., he said.

Mahaney was describing the fate of textile towns all over the country. Despite a surge in manufacturing employment in November, economists say it´s unlikely that Kannapolis-based Pillowtex and other factories will ever regain the market they have ceded to foreign manufacturers. As globalization sends textile jobs overseas, rural factory towns like Kannapolis will have no choice but to hitch their economies to the nearest big city.

“Charlotte is a financial center with lots of service jobs,” Kannapolis Assistant City Manager Mike Legg said of the metropolitan city 25 miles south. “The skill levels of our workers probably are not there for the financial jobs, but they would be for the service jobs.”

In other words, people who once made towels and sheets at Pillowtex will instead serve people working in the nation´s second-largest financial center.

If they work at all, they will likely be data processors, truck drivers, day-care providers, teachers, cooks and waiters. They will retrain themselves at the expense of the federal government — two years unemployment pay and free tuition are typical for people who lose a job because of imports or foreign labor. And they will serve the personal and professional needs of Charlotte´s bankers, brokers and chief executives.The very idea sends a shudder through former Pillowtex mechanic Jessica Jackson. Three generations of Jacksons have lived and worked in Kannapolis, and she doesn´t plan to alter the trend.

“I´m staying right here, hon, one way or another,” she said. “I ain´t getting on the interstate and driving to Charlotte.”

Mill towns become relics

A few years ago, the suggestion that Kannapolis would depend on Charlotte for jobs would have been considered blasphemy by the 38,000 country folk living here.

But that attitude, like mill towns themselves, is becoming a relic of a time when American consumers bought retail products that were American-made. Those days are mostly gone, as evidenced by the idle smokestacks at Pillowtex.

Economists say mass layoffs like the one that rocked Kannapolis when Pillowtex closed in July are harbingers of what will happen in 2005 when U.S. quotas on textile imports completely disappear.

There´s simply no place for $10- and $15-per-hour factory jobs in the streamlined business world. U.S. labor unions can´t compete with the lower wages, lower costs of living and overall lower costs of doing business in developing countries from South America to Asia.

Low-skill manufacturing jobs are being sacrificed for the good of domestic and foreign economies, for global diplomacy and, in the heady words of U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick, for “hemispheric prosperity.”

Which means squat to the people sitting in a shuttered factory waiting to discuss their options with overworked career counselors.

“I was surprised by how many people I had been working next to who didn´t have even a high school diploma. What are they going to do?” asked laid-off Pillowtex worker Herman Fisher. “When you close a factory you are messing with people´s livelihoods. That´s serious.”

Of the laid-off Kannapolis workers, one-third had a spouse who worked in the factory and also lost a job. Nearly half of the workers surveyed by the town were behind on their mortgage or rent payments, and one of 10 had received notices of foreclosure or eviction.

“These numbers will certainly grow as weeks pass,” a city audit predicted.

Of more than 3 million jobs lost in the past three years, about 2.8 million were in manufacturing. Roughly 83 percent of all garments sold in the United States today are made offshore, as are 80 percent of the toys, 90 percent of the sporting goods and 95 percent of the shoes.

Record layoffs

The closing of Pillowtex, better known in the Carolinas as Fieldcrest Cannon, cost 7,650 people their jobs nationwide. It was one of the largest single-day layoffs in U.S. textile history. A dozen towns in North Carolina absorbed about half the job losses, with Kannapolis taking the biggest hit. There was no summit to announce the end in Kannapolis, just awkward phone calls and voice-mail messages delivered by shift bosses.

“Don´t come to work. A packet in the mail will explain,” a message left on machine mechanic Jessica Jackson´s voice-mail said.

Today, taxpayers are covering two-thirds of her former wages on the condition that she take advantage of the government´s offer of a free education. So at Rowan-Cabarrus Community College, Jackson, a 29-year-old high school dropout with a GED, is training to become a teacher´s aide. Being an elementary schoolteacher was always a dream.

“But a teacher´s aide makes $8 an hour. A teacher´s salary begins at $21,000 to $25,000 per year around here,” she said. “With overtime last year, I earned $34,000 at the factory.”

She canceled last summer´s beach trip, moved in with her mother and pulled her 7-year-old son from his soccer league, which charged $60 dues.

“Santa Claus ain´t going to be too good this year either,” she said. “More than anything, I´d like my factory job back.”

Raymond Seaford, a shipping supervisor and a 40-year veteran of Pillowtex, saw the end coming three years ago.

“We started seeing boxes of our finished product arriving from Pakistan, India and Turkey with our labels,” he said.

At first, Seaford´s workers repackaged the towels and sheets into boxes stamped “Kannapolis,” then trucked them to retail outlets. Eventually, so many imported boxes came in that they gave up the pretense.

“Depressing thing was that when we´d open up those boxes we´d find towels that were made pretty good and packaged real good. Packaged better than we did it, to be honest,” Seaford said.

At a Wal-Mart SuperCenter that opened this summer five miles from Kannapolis´ closed factories, bath towels from India sell for $2.88.

Next to them are American-made towels that look and feel identical. They sell for $5.92.

“Why would anyone today buy a $6 towel?” Seaford asked.

http://www.idahostatesman.com/Business/story.asp?ID=56389