By Greg Barrett
Gannett News Service

Raymond Seaford, formerly a shipping supervisor at Pillowtex, waits outside the building. (Gannett News Service photo)

KANNAPOLIS, N.C. - The old mill town is searching for silver linings and grasping at threads.

When a textile factory in Kannapolis closed this summer, wiping out 1,571 jobs here in a single day, the laid-off workers felt a sense of panic.

City Manager Michael Mahaney, who in July had likened his town's jobless situation to an emergency room triage, predicted good things for Kannapolis a few months later. "People are maybe just going to have to start commuting" to Charlotte, he said.

Mahaney was describing the fate of textile towns all over the country. Despite a surge in manufacturing employment in November, economists say it's unlikely that Kannapolis-based Pillowtex and other factories will ever regain the market they have ceded to foreign manufacturers. Rural factory towns like Kannapolis will have no choice but to hitch their economies to the nearest big city.

"Charlotte is a financial center with lots of service jobs," Kannapolis Assistant City Manager Mike Legg said of the city 25 miles south. "The skill levels of our workers probably are not there for the financial jobs, but they would be for the service jobs."

In other words, people who once made towels and sheets at Pillowtex will instead serve people working in the nation's second-largest financial center.

If they work at all, they will likely be data processors, truck drivers, day-care providers, teachers, cooks and waiters. They will retrain themselves at the expense of the federal government - two years unemployment pay and free tuition are typical for people who lose a job because of imports or foreign labor. And they will serve the personal and professional needs of Charlotte's bankers, brokers and chief executives. The very idea sends a shudder through former Pillowtex mechanic Jessica Jackson. Three generations of Jacksons have lived and worked in Kannapolis, a town of 38,000.

"I'm staying right here, hon, one way or another," she said. "I ain't getting on the interstate and driving to Charlotte."

Economists say mass layoffs like the one that rocked Kannapolis in July are harbingers of what will happen in 2005 when U.S. quotas on textile imports completely disappear.

There's simply no place for $10- and $15-per-hour factory jobs in the streamlined business world. U.S. labor unions can't compete with the lower wages and overall lower costs of doing business in developing countries from South America to Asia.

Low-skill manufacturing jobs are being sacrificed for the good of domestic and foreign economies, for global diplomacy and, in the heady words of U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick, for "hemispheric prosperity."

Which means squat to the people sitting in a closed factory waiting to discuss their options with overworked career counselors.

"I was surprised by how many people I had been working next to who didn't have even a high school diploma. What are they going to do?" asked Pillowtex worker Herman Fisher.

Of the laid-off Kannapolis workers, one-third had a spouse who worked in the factory and also lost a job. Nearly half of the workers surveyed by the town were behind on their mortgage or rent payments, and one of 10 had received notices of foreclosure or eviction.

"These numbers will certainly grow as weeks pass," a city audit predicted.

The closing of Pillowtex, better known in the Carolinas as Fieldcrest Cannon, cost 7,650 people their jobs nationwide. It was one of the largest single-day layoffs in U.S. textile history.