Textile threats loom large

Textile companies fear a flood of Chinese imports next year.
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
SPINDALE, N.C. -- Essie Wilkie scoured the aisles of the job fair, but once again didn't find a hint of a job.
"You start running the numbers of the plants closed and people out of work in this county, and we are sure hurting," the 55-year-old textile worker said dejectedly.
Pounded by cheap foreign textiles among other problems, North Carolina has shed 216,000 factory jobs, or 27 percent of its blue-collar work force, putting it second only to California in the number of factory jobs lost since 1998. And it is expected to get worse.
Wave of fear
Come 2005, worldwide quotas on textiles and apparel expire under World Trade Organization rules, and China is expected to unleash an even greater wave of less costly goods. That is a terrifying scenario for North Carolina, the nation's textile center.
"Dec. 31, 2004, is the big stop sign for us," said Jim Cowan as he walked the darkened halls of a sprawling Spindale textile mill that he closed five years ago. "The game is over, if the Chinese can bring in everything they want."
Indeed, American and foreign textile industry leaders, hoping to forestall the end of the quotas, say as many as 630,000 textile-related jobs in the United States and 30 million worldwide are likely to disappear if the Chinese are not stopped.
Textile and apparel-makers in the United States have already slashed 850,000 jobs in the past decade, leaving about 700,000 positions.
Although some discount the talk of a Chinese avalanche, saying retailers will not shift production so quickly or broadly to China, others point out what has happened since quotas were lifted a few years ago on some Chinese imports to the United States.
Fast shift
China's share of imported luggage made from textiles jumped from 10 percent to 90 percent of the U.S. market in less than two years, according to the National Council of Textile Organizations.
One result of the textile industry's meltdown is that fierce competitors as well as UNITE, the garment workers union, have joined forces to fight the WTO changes. But there is a deep skepticism here about a reprieve.
"I'm not waiting for the government to bail me out," remarked Jim Chesnutt, a textile industry leader and head of National Spinning Co. in Washington, N.C.
His 85-year-old firm cut its work force in half, to 1,000, a few years ago and shipped work overseas for the first time.
"We are mostly small companies that are trying to figure out how to stay alive, and I can't tell how many will because I've seen many of my friends who haven't been able to weather this storm," he said.
Textile mills were at one time a salvation for dozens of small rural communities such as Spindale, population 4,000. Decades ago poor Southerners grabbed low-wage, nonunion jobs displaced from Midwest and New England factories.
Giant mills collapse
Now the state has reeled as the giant mills have collapsed. Pillowtex's closing last July wiped out 4,800 jobs in one day -- the single largest job loss in the state's history.
Because so many job losses were caused by imports, North Carolina has more workers receiving federal benefits meant to help those hurt by foreign products than any other state, said David Clegg, deputy chairman of North Carolina's Employment Security Commission.
Similarly, for the first time in North Carolina's history, its unemployment fund is running a deficit because of the surge in the jobless and the long-term unemployed, he added.
A metaphor for these job losses is Spindale, a classic mill town with rows of white clapboard houses built for workers by the mill owners, who planned the town and named it for the spindles their workers used.
Nestled amid green, slow-rising foothills about an hour west of Charlotte, Spindale is a town where life was good when the textiles were doing well. It was a one-industry town where not much schooling was needed for a mill job.
Now it's not clear what will replace the mills and the jobs and all that vanished with them.
Eighty-one years after the town was born, four out of five mills are shut, and the fifth has dramatically cut back its work force. Spindale is the industrial core of Rutherford County, where the most recent jobless rate was 13.2 percent, the state's second highest.
Foreclosures are up. Charitable donations are down.
The local Wal-Mart closed two years ago and moved about a mile away to the next town, opening a larger store there and taking with it a handful of stores. That drove down Spindale's revenues too.
Town staff
With less money coming in, the town has laid off 10 of its 37 workers. Tim Barth, Spindale's town manager, has taken on the work once done by the code enforcement officer, although he barely gets around to it.
Yet Barth is hopeful.
"I'm like a lot of people. I think we've reached the bottom," he said from his small, crowded office.