An Industry Trying to Land on its Feet
How North Carolina textiles can survive the import flood.
by Neil Caudle
endeavors
Spring 2005

Small companies such as DeFeet, which makes bicycle socks
in Hildebran, North Carolina, are finding niche markets where
know-how and flexibility mean more than large-scale production.

But no matter how successful companies might be at exploiting
those niches, no one expects the textiles and apparel industries
to replace tens of thousands of jobs.  Meenu Tewari, assistant
professor at DCRP, has studied workforce changes in traditional
industries in North Carolina.  She finds some hope in organizations
such as Bionetwork, an effort of the N.C. Community College System.  “Bionetwork saw a way to recruit and retrain workers
displaced from North Carolina’s traditional sectors — textiles, apparel, and furniture — workers who were solidly embedded
in the ethic of shop-floor manufacturing,” Tewari says.  “With short training courses, from a few months to a year in length,
they found that they could channel some traditional-sector workers who’d earned thirty thousand dollars-plus into good jobs
paying forty-five to fifty thousand a year.”

But many thousands of displaced workers probably will never have access to such jobs, Tewari says.  Workers who are older,
poorer, and less educated are being left out of the high-tech job market, especially in isolated rural areas.  So rural towns
once dependent on textiles, apparel, or furniture are pursuing other options, she says, including a multitude of businesses
associated with the growing health-care industry.

Read the complete article on-line at endeavors.unc.edu