Slow death: As textile plants close or shrink, a way of life is vanishing

SHELBY, N.C. — Padlocked gates and knee-high grass surround many of the textile mills that were the lifeblood of this region for much of the last century. The scars — like the silent brick smokestacks — will remain for some time.

Few parts of America are suffering as much from the economic slowdown as the textile belt that runs through the western Carolinas and into northern Georgia. Textile-job losses are the worst since the Depression.

The unemployment rate soared to 12.2 percent in July here in Cleveland County, a collection of small towns linked by two-lane highways that cut through small farms. The national average is 4.5 percent. An hour's drive away in the banking hub of Charlotte in Mecklenburg County, unemployment is 4 percent.

Here in the textile region, however, the nation's sharp economic slowdown and the relentless forces of globalization have combined to produce an economic version of the perfect storm, which threatens to obliterate an industry and a way of life.

Here's how the storm gathers strength: Inexpensive imports drive less-competitive U.S. companies out of business. Some survive by replacing workers with automation to cut costs. Then the slowdown delivers a knockout blow to those that were barely making it. Just as those workers are laid off, other jobs dry up as the economy slows.

All their working lives

Many former textile workers can't imagine life without the mills. Mostly middle-aged or older, they have spent all their working lives in the industry. Some have only eighth-grade educations. Most have families to raise and medical bills to pay.

"It's just been textiles," said JoAnn Bowen, a 62-year-old worker who was laid off along with her husband when Doran Mills closed in Shelby three months ago. "It's all I ever knowed."

In other industries, workers are waiting for a recovery that will bring back their jobs. Despite the dot-com and telecom crashes, American high technology has a future, although one with smaller stock options and less-exalted expectations.

But a textile mill that closes is unlikely ever to reopen. The number of employees in the industry fell 11 percent in the past year to 469,000, the lowest level since the end of World War II. Nearly two-thirds of those jobs are in three states: North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia.

In Cleveland County, the closing of Doran Mills on May 31 wiped out 350 jobs. A month earlier, Cleveland Mills shut down, laying off 225 workers. Another mill, Grover Industries, shut down a yarn-dyeing division in August, dismissing 45 workers.

Suddenly jobless

Often, the end comes with no warning.

Bowen, who inspected the finished fabric, and her husband, Harold, also 62, who repaired the looms, arrived at Doran Mills early, as they did every day, for the 6 a.m. shift. They parked in the employee lot, grabbed their lunch bags and headed toward the plant.

"Ain't no use taking your lunch bag," another worker told them, "because they shut it down."

By 9 a.m., the Bowens had packed Harold's tools in the back and were driving down the highway to their home south of town. The three hours' pay they got for being at the mill that morning was the last paycheck they would see.

The couple had hoped to work until they were 65 and then apply for Social Security, so they would get the full benefit. Instead, they applied at 62 and are getting 20 percent less.

Together with their unemployment benefits, which run out in November, that brings in less than $2,000 a month, about half of what the Bowens earned before. And they no longer have health insurance.

With time on his hands now, Harold Bowen has been building a roof over the small deck outside their home. They say they will have to find some kind of work but have little idea what.

Doran was the last of what was once a small empire of seven textile mills, founded in 1907 by John Dover and employing 1,500 workers in the 1950s. The plant, now empty, sits just outside Shelby, a town of 19,000.

Harold Bowen, who has an eighth-grade education, went to work at a Dover mill in 1957, when he was 18. He and JoAnn, whose parents also worked at Dover mills, got married the next year.

He's thankful for getting 44 years of employment out of the mills. "The Dovers fed my family for 40 years," he said.

Leonard Huffstetler, a Doran supervisor, knows the Bowens. He started at 16 at the Doran mill and stayed there 43 years, except for six months when the company sent him to another mill. Huffstetler's wife, Gail, has diabetes and heart disease. Medicare covers her treatments, but not her prescription-drug bill of $1,100 a month. When he had a job, the company health plan paid about half that bill. Now it all comes out of his $375 weekly unemployment check and the couple's savings.

Health insurance

For many workers, losing their health insurance is worse than losing their paychecks. Private health plans can be prohibitively expensive, particularly when their only income is from unemployment benefits that run out in six months.

"All the money you saved for retirement, you see it going away pretty fast," Huffstetler said. "I'm glad I got it, but it's not exactly the way we had our life planned."

At 60, he worries that his age is working against him in looking for a new job. The time off has given him more time to take care of his wife, but he's uneasy.

"Every day, I'm almost thankful and worried to death," he said. "It's a mixed feeling. For sure I need to go back to work, not only for her health but her mental state, too. She worries about the bills, too."

At 42, Jeff Mode is among the younger former Doran workers. Even at his age, finding a new job is tough with so many others looking for work. About 5,700 people are jobless in Cleveland County, more than twice as many as a year ago.

He figures he's put in job applications at upward of 100 businesses in the past three months. He has dropped in at many of the remaining mills in the area.

So far, he has come up empty.

One job evaporated before his eyes. He recently applied at Shelby Dyeing and Finishing. The same week, he picked up the local paper and learned the mill is to close in mid-September, laying off all of its 80 workers.

Hopes that new jobs would take the place of old ones are on hold. Construction of a fiber-optic cable plant in Cleveland County stopped this summer because of the collapsing demand for telecommunications equipment.

Wal-Mart is supposed to break ground in September on a regional distribution center just outside Shelby that is to employ about 600 people when it's completed in a year — a long wait.

Mode's unemployment runs out in November. He canceled his summer vacation — five days in Myrtle Beach, S.C. — and said he couldn't buy presents for his mother's birthday or for his father and stepfather on Father's Day. He still has loan payments on his 1996 Nissan Sentra GXE.

"I've been angry and bitter," he said. "I feel my life has been put on hold."

It's been several months since Bessie Littlejohn saw even an unemployment check. She was one of 650 people who lost their jobs when Shelby Yarn, another spin-off of the Dover empire, closed last year. Every day is a struggle to make ends meet.

On some mornings, the 53-year-old former millworker still rises at 5 a.m. as if she had a job to go to.

"You walk to the door, you stand in the door with a cup of coffee and a cigarette, and you ask yourself, `Where do I go from here?' " she said. "But no answer comes."

Her faith sustains her. In Cleveland County, going to church on Sundays and Bible study on weekday evenings is a way of life. Many laid-off workers say God will see them through.

Littlejohn keeps several Bibles in her neat, one-story home. She quotes from memory a passage from Psalm 37 that reassures her whenever she wonders how she is going to survive:

"I've never seen the righteous forsaken, nor their seed begging bread."

In the small town of Grover, which has a population of 698 and lies south of Shelby, Grover Industries is trying to keep up hope.

The mill laid off 45 workers last month when it closed a yarn-dyeing division and shifted the work to its other plant in the town of Tryon. The firm's sales of dyed yarn have slumped to 70,000 pounds a week; each of the two plants can do 125,000 pounds on its own.

"We closed this one and moved to another dyeing — D-Y-E-I-N-G, not D-Y-I-N-G — facility," said owner Charlie Harry, 64, who deftly maneuvers around the factory in a battery-powered wheelchair, which he uses because of a childhood bout with polio.

His grandfather started making tablecloths in Grover in 1919. Eight decades later, Harry said, "we feel like we're in survival mode."

Those are worrisome words for the 200 employees who remain.

"I'm still getting a 40-hour week, but it's very scary to see everything closing down around us," said Sherwood Oates, a 45-year-old maintenance man.

He and his wife have cut back on their weekend shopping trips. And the $600 federal income-tax rebate check went straight into the bank.

"I was scared to spend it," he said. "We might need it down the road."

120 laid off at S.C. plant

SPARTANBURG, S.C. — Tough market conditions at home and abroad have led the KoSa textile company to "temporarily" lay off 120 of its Spartanburg employees.

Officials at KoSa, which has its world headquarters in Texas, said the layoffs would take place between November and January.

There is no word on when employees might be allowed to return.

The Spartanburg facility heads KoSa's textile staple business — the largest producer of high-performance polyester staple in North America. It employs about 650.

Erica Luongo, a KoSa public-relations supervisor, said how many employees will return and when depends on the market. The market has flooded the textile industry with Asian fabrics and hurt the overall textile business, Luongo said.

Bill Monroe, the manager of administration at KoSa in Spartanburg, said there is a risk in letting so many good people go.

KoSa has 9,000 employees in 16 manufacturing sites in six countries. Officials said the Spartanburg KoSa plant is the only one being affected by cuts.

In recent weeks, TNS Mills announced shutdowns at plants in Greer and Gaffney, and Mayfair Mills filed for bankruptcy, affecting more than 800 employees in three South Carolina facilities.

2 press for workers' aid

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Two members of Congress have asked federal labor officials to reconsider their decision to deny as many as 400 former workers at Elizabeth Webbing Mills extended unemployment benefits and re-employment services under a program designed to help companies hurt by foreign competition.

The requests by Rep. Patrick Kennedy and Sen. Jack Reed came after the federal Department of Labor in Washington denied an application from Elizabeth Webbing for extended benefits for workers who lost their jobs when the Central Falls textile mill closed in June.

Under the Trade Adjustment Assistance program, workers who lose jobs because of competition from foreign imports can receive up to 18 months of unemployment benefits if they are enrolled in a worker-retraining program, according to George Burke of the state Department of Labor and Training.

Without it, the workers' unemployment benefits run out after 26 weeks.

Elizabeth Webbing, which made straps for suitcases, seat belts, pet collars and tie-downs for trucks, was in bankruptcy proceedings for two years before a failed effort to reorganize its finances forced it to close.

Many workers at the Central Falls facility were immigrants with little formal schooling who had spent the better part of their lives working at the mill.

About two weeks ago, with the help of an organizer from Progresso Latino, a community group in Central Falls, about a dozen former workers at the mill walked over to Kennedy's Pawtucket office to ask for help in appealing their denial of Trade Adjustment benefits.

"Most of them couldn't even speak English," said Larry Berman, the congressman's news secretary. "They were very confused, they didn't understand. It was a very sad situation."

Berman said the company may not have provided enough information in its benefits-request application to persuade federal labor officials to approve it.

Elizabeth Webbing was the manufacturing arm of California Webbing Industries, which also operated distribution facilities around the country. A year ago, the company had more than 500 employees, but the number dwindled. The mill had about 280 workers in Central Falls when it closed in June.