After a more than a century of churning out towels, sheets and bedspreads for American homes, there's no future for textiles in this self-proclaimed "city of looms" and many other North Carolina towns fear the same fate. As part of a 1994 world trade agreement, decades of US quota restrictions on clothing and apparel imports come to an end on December 31.
The US Labour Department forecasts the US apparel industry will shrink by 69 percent - or some 245,000 jobs - between 2002 and 2012 due largely to increased competition from China when the quota system expires. US textile industry employment will fall by 31 percent - or about 152,000 jobs.
Those numbers are probably conservative unless the federal government takes steps to keep the Chinese from taking over the US market, said Steve Dobbins, president of Carolina Mills, which is based in Maiden, North Carolina.
"We're not anti-international trade," Dobbins said. "We just don't want to get killed."
When Pillowtex Corp shut its doors on July 30, 2003, many people in Kannapolis felt as if they'd been struck by a natural disaster. The town had been built around Cannon Mills, which began business in 1887 and became part of Pillowtex in 1997.
In the largest layoff in state history, about 4,800 workers in Kannapolis and surrounding counties lost their jobs. Their average age was 46. Almost half had no high school diploma. Nearly 60 percent were female. Many did not know how they would make their next rent or mortgage payment.
"It knocked this city to its knees," said Kannapolis Mayor Ray Moss. "When a hurricane hits, it takes away homes. What happened here is a catastrophe that took away jobs and left houses. They own homes they can't pay for because they have no jobs."
The closure also left a nearly 6 million square feet (557,400 square metres) facility comprised of about 20 different buildings sitting on 145 acres (58 hectares) in the middle of town.
Harris Raynor, southern regional director of the UNITE HERE textile and hotel workers union, said no one was interested in buying the company to keep it running.
Instead, the plant has been hulled out and its equipment sold to other textile producers around the world.
"There's no future for textiles in Kannopolis," Moss said, noting it is luckier than many other communities because the rapid growth of the nearby city of Charlotte has helped many former Pillowtex workers find new jobs.
City officials hope to find a buyer soon for the property, which will probably be redeveloped into multiple uses that could include shops, houses, light industry or an entertainment and recreation complex, said City manager Mike Legg.
Altogether, more than 60,000 textile and apparel jobs have been lost in North Carolina since 2001. To drive home that point to the state's politicians, what's left of the industry has purchased 48 billboard ads scattered throughout North Carolina that read: "Stop Sending Jobs Overseas. Fix Trade Policy Now! Register .... Vote!"
They've also joined with textile and clothing producers in surrounding states to urge the Bush administration to aggressively use its right under World Trade Organisation rules to slap temporary curbs on billions of dollars of clothing from China when the quotas end.
Beijing agreed when it joined the WTO to let the United States and other members impose annual "safeguard" restrictions on its imports in response to a market-destabilising surge through the end of 2008.
While US producers have been living in fear of January 1, 2005, China has been "increasing their textile and apparel industries dramatically," said Jerry Rowland, president of National Textiles in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
"They've purchased 65 to 75 percent of all the textile capital equipment sold in the world in the last three years."
The safeguards would allow US producers to survive until a longer-term solution can be found, perhaps as part of current world trade talks, the industry hopes.
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