When she graduated high school in 1978, Lisa Joyner knew if she began a career in the textile industry, she would always have a job — or at least that’s what everyone told her.
For the nearly two decades that followed, everything went well. She worked hard and maintained steady employment. She enjoyed her career, and best of all, she felt secure.
But reality soon came crashing down. Brown Wooten Mills, a former leading supplier of hosiery to large retail chains, declared bankruptcy in 1997 and later closed its distribution center in Burlington, N.C., putting more than 600 employees out of work.
Joyner was one of them.
But the mills’ demise wasn’t an isolated incident — according to Joyner, the closing of Brown Wooten was just the beginning of a long series of plant closings across the state.
“Brown Wooten and Tower Hosiery Mills [also in Burlington] had been around for many years, and both went out of business with other companies struggling to stay afloat,” she said.
Since then, the North Carolina textile industry has only gotten worse. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of people employed in textile manufacturing in the state fell by nearly 6,000 from 2004 to 2011.
Joyner, who now works as assistant manager at local Burlington thrift store Trollinger Treasures, says there can only be one cause for the closings — offshore job outsourcing.
“The downfall began when products started going overseas — Mexico and China,” she said. “A lot of companies ended up closing their doors, not just textiles.”
Offshoring presents both benefits and consequences for the local and national economy, so experts find it hard to say how much this practice can be blamed for the gradual decline.
But for former small-town mill workers like Joyner, whose entire livelihood was based around making products with her owns hands, the feel of a cotton t-shirt or a pair of woolen socks will never be the same again.
The rise and fall of a tradition
North Carolina’s long relationship with textile manufacturing is defined by a rich history that dates back nearly two centuries.
Michael Schenck is credited with creating the state’s first cotton textile mill around 1815 in Lincoln County. After that, many other rural areas followed suit, building small “mill hill” communities that thrived on the production of locally made textile products.
The industry continued to grow, even after severe economic ruin caused by the Civil War, and by the 1920s, North Carolina was the center of the American textile industry.
In 1923 — arguably one of the industry’s best years — there were 351 mills across the state employing 81,041 workers and producing $326.5 million in goods annually.
The industry continued to flourish well into the late 20th century. According to “The North Carolina Textiles Project: An Initial Report,” a study conducted by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the industry reached its peak in 1992 when textile production represented 16 percent of total manufacturing output, as compared to the U.S. average of just over two percent of total manufacturing in textiles.
“North Carolina had been the preeminent producer of textiles and apparel in the United States for a long time,” said Patrick J. Conway, who serves as department chair of economics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and helped conduct the study. “When you look at reports on textile production over the years, North Carolina was ranked no. 1 in nearly all of the various categories in terms of volume among all the states.”
Competing on an international scale
But the state’s manufacturing success wouldn’t last forever.
In 1996, there were 2,153 textile and apparel plants in North Carolina employing 233,715 people. By 2006, only 1,282 plants with 80,232 workers remained, representing a 40 percent decline in the number of plants and a 65 percent decrease in employment.
The downturn was allegedly caused by a series of events that took place in the 1990s. First, the 1995 decision to phase out the Agreement on Textiles and Clothing quotas by 2005 led to the loss of trade protection formerly enjoyed by U.S. textile and apparel companies and exposed them to the rigors of global competition.
This event then led to the main reason — or at least the reason often pointed to as having the largest impact — for the decline: The newly reduced cost of outsourcing production to developing countries.
“Offshore job outsourcing is when a company decides it would be cheaper to make something or perform a service somewhere other than the home country,” said Pat Bell, instructor in management at Elon University. “If it would be less expensive to assemble something overseas than it would be to do it here in the U.S., move it offshore.”
Outsourcing became much more appealing to companies after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into being in 1994 with the addition of Mexico to the existing U.S.-Canada free trade area, according to “The North Carolina Textiles Project.” Additionally, the Mexican peso experienced a sharp depreciation in comparison to the U.S. dollar in 1994, along with the currency depreciations of several Asian nations, such as Thailand and Korea, in 1997.
“This meant that many Mexican and Asian textile plants became much less expensive for U.S. producers, so anyone making products in the U.S. after that time would start looking in that direction,” Conway said.
The offshore movement introduced both opportunity and loss for the textile industry. At the state level, some larger corporations were able to exploit outsourcing to their advantage, while many smaller companies couldn’t keep up with the competition and had to close down or cut jobs as a result.
At the national level, supporters of offshoring argue there are a variety of benefits to the United States economy as a whole, such as keeping inflation low.
“Then again, that’s really of no benefit to someone who just lost their job to a worker overseas,” Bell said.
Thus, this act of globalization can be viewed as a two-edged sword, cutting some much more deeply than others.
Feeling the economic impact
The city of Burlington is no stranger to the decline of the North Carolina textile industry.
As one of the state’s largest producers of knitwear throughout the 20th century, Burlington’s local economy was drastically impacted when textile plants started moving out or closing down altogether.
“[Burlington] is a vestige of its former self,” said Bell, who is a former sales manager at Glen Raven Mills. “In this area, there are just a handful of the old players that are still here, and the ones that are still here employ fewer people than they did in the past.”
Indeed, the startling statistics for employment decreases across North Carolina are reflected in Alamance County, of which Burlington is the largest city.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment in manufacturing companies in Alamance County has decreased from 14,215 employees annually in 2003 to 8,687 in 2009, with only a slight increase to 8,855 in 2012.
“[The city] is hurt,” said John Burbridge, professor of operations and supply chain management at Elon University. “There are no if, ands or buts about it. It’s hurt. I came here in 1996 and we still had a lot of textile businesses in Burlington, but over the next few years, I saw plant after plant closing.”
According to Burbridge, offshore job outsourcing has certainly played a large role in the demise of many of these plants.
Burlington Industries, Inc., one of the largest textile producers of the 1960s and 1970s, held its headquarters in Burlington for decades before moving its base to Greensboro. But in the late 1990s, the company closed most of its North Carolina plants due to inability to keep up with global competition, eliminating more than 3,000 jobs in the process.
As a result, the company declared bankruptcy in 2003. A year later, it merged with Cone Mills Corporation to create International Textile Group, which sought to be the key player leading consolidation to make the industry more competitive with low-cost offshore producers.
“From the standpoint of the restructuring, certainly that is something that no company wants to go through,” said Delores Sides, director of corporate communications and human resources at International Textile Group. “But what it did allow Burlington Industries to do was to get rid of debt that was really weighing the company down and give it the ability to focus on its stronger businesses.”
Though Burlington Industries operates under a new name and has operations in Mexico and China in addition to the U.S., Sides says it’s important for customers to understand that Burlington Industries products are still a strong name in the marketplace.
“Our products are sold under the [Burlington Industries] brand name, so it’s very much something that we’ve been able to build on as a legacy of Burlington, but now with a company that is structured to be much more globally competitive,” she said.
Making necessary adjustments
But not everyone caved under the pressure of globalization — Burlington’s Graham Dyeing & Finishing, founded in 1988, has managed to survive the textile industry’s decline, and its future is looking brighter than ever.
Greg Gravitte serves as president and owner of the private company, which specializes in hosiery production and maintains an average of 50 to 100 employees at a time.
“Most of our neighbors around here that have been in this business are no longer around anymore,” he said. “We’re one of the few who are still doing OK.”
Gravitte says impeccable customer service is one of the key components behind his company’s continuance, as well as knowing how to grapple with efficiently pricing products in today’s global economy.
“I compete against some of these prices every day,” he said. “It does have an impact on how much we pay our people because we still have to be in a competitive market. If we didn’t have that, we wouldn’t even be here doing what we’re doing, so pricing is still important.”
As far as the uncertainty regarding the future of the North Carolina textile industry, Gravitte says he’s confident in his team’s ability to continue to prosper.
“The future of our company is as stable today as it has been in the past,” he said. “It won’t be the manufacturing Alamance County had in the 1970s and 1980s, but it will eventually be back to a level of ‘Made in the U.S.A.’ products. We’ve survived through this part of it — we should have better times ahead.”
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Innovation as the key to revitalization
Gravitte’s optimism may be more than just wishful thinking.
Despite the abundance of negativity surrounding the current state of textiles in the U.S., the industry appears to be reinventing itself.
The National Spinning Company plant in Burlington is yet another example of a company that has managed to survive the national textile decline. Plant manager Ed Atkins credits the company’s success, firstly, to its ability to produce higher quality, unique items.
“We’ve managed to continue to make a profit and stay in business by moving away from the commodity items and more towards some of the niche markets,” he said. “Sheets, towels, underwear — all those commodity items — they’ll never come back because it just doesn’t make sense to produce those here [in the U.S.].”
National Spinning Company’s niche-market items can be produced because of the company’s high tech product line, which Atkins lists as the second major reason for their success. The plant’s automated machines dye more than 250,000 pounds of yarn per week in a variety of colors, which are then sent to clothing and upholstery makers both in the U.S. and around the world.
The company’s labor force is much smaller as a result, with usually no more than 100 employees at a time, but Atkins says he predicts this will soon become the norm in today’s globalized age.
“Our labor complement is certainly lower than it was 10 or 15 years ago, but we need to have a really strong technical footprint,” he said. “That’s the way the industry is going to survive.”
Lisa D. Hanna, vice president of communications of the non-profit Council on Competitiveness, says the future of the textile industry lies in innovation, which she says United States citizens are highly capable of.
“There have been a lot of great developments in manufacturing and jobs are starting to come home,” she said. “We have made a lot of advances in high performance computing, and a lot of manufacturers, particularly in the textile industry, are starting to bring innovations back into the market as they focus on preserving jobs and rebuilding the job market.”
Hanna says manufacturers must realize they are now operating in a completely global market, and if they can make the necessary adjustments to survive in this new system, regional and national textile and apparel industries will be back on track in no time.
“We’ve been operating in an innovation deficit for way too long,” she said. “Now is the time to step it up and make things happen, and that’s what we’ll continue to work towards now and in the future.”