MEP News
By Peter S. Goodman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 3, 2007; A01
Adapting to a New Market
"We didn't see it coming," the furniture man grimly declared.
Michael K. Dugan once ran Henredon Furniture Industries, which operated a plant in Spruce Pine, a former mining town in the rugged mountains in the western part of the state. There the company made hand-carved wooden bedroom furniture, once employing more than 1,000 people. Many lacked high school diplomas and some were illiterate, yet the factory provided a way for these workers to support families and to acquire modest homes and cars. It paid roughly $14 an hour, plus health and pension benefits.
Henredon's four-poster beds retailed for about $5,000 in the early 1990s, Dugan recalled. A few years later, similar models started showing up from the Philippines for less than $2,000. Now they can be found for $799, produced by workers in southern China who earn as little as 40 cents an hour.
Henredon first trimmed its workforce. Three years ago, it shut down the plant, eliminating the last 350 positions and adding to a wave of layoffs in surrounding Mitchell County, which has had roughly one-fifth of its jobs wiped out since 2000, according to the Employment Security Commission of North Carolina.
Many of the storefronts in Spruce Pine's brick downtown are empty. Restaurants and shops have closed, succumbing to a dearth of local spending power.
"The kids are moving out," said Brenda Smith, a youth pastor at a teen center. "They can't find anywhere to work. There's Wal-Mart, and that's about it."
For 26 years, Phillip Wilson worked at Henredon as a master carver. Now, on most days, he wakes before dawn and drives to his new job -- the 5:30 a.m. shift as a prison guard at the medium-security Mountain View correctional facility. His pay is down 15 percent, forcing him into a second job at a used-appliance store to make ends meet.
Throughout the state, and indeed the nation, laid-off factory workers are typically able to find new jobs but mostly for lower pay. A June 2002 study published by the North Carolina Justice and Community Development Center found that workers who lost manufacturing jobs in 1999 and 2000 were earning 72 percent of their previous salaries six months later.
Furniture-making is typical of the manufacturing sectors that are shrinking in the United States. For many, labor represents a relatively high proportion of total costs, making them vulnerable to foreign competition. If factories cannot automate, they die.
The textile industry has been particularly aggressive in replacing people with machines. A half-century ago, a typical North Carolina textile worker operated five machines at once, each capable of running a thread through a loom at 100 times a minute. Now machines run six times as fast, and one worker oversees 100 of them.
With machines increasingly occupying the center of production, manufacturers want highly trained, literate workers at the controls. To meet the demand and help workers secure jobs, North Carolina has beefed up course offerings at its community colleges.
Three years ago, it set up Bionetwork, a training program based in community colleges, to feed workers into the state's growing biotech sector.
"All of the skills are closely tied to the workplace," said Norman Smit, Bionetwork's recruitment director.
Smit seeks students from declining areas of manufacturing. Given intensive training and a willingness to adapt, a textile or furniture worker can become a better-paid biotech technician, he says. As proof, he points to Regina Whitaker.
Ten years ago, straight out of high school, Whitaker went to work at a yarn texturing plant in Yadkinville, in the Piedmont region. Her mother had worked there for 30 years.
From midnight until 8 a.m., Whitaker tended to whirring machinery, alternately wishing for another job and worrying that she would actually have to find one: Her company was opening plants in China and Brazil and laying people off in Yadkinville.
"I couldn't see spending my life there," Whitaker said.
In January 2003, she enrolled in the first associate degree classes offered in biotechnology at Forsyth Technical Community College. Now 28, she graduated in July 2004 and was hired as a lab technician at Targacept, a biotech start-up in Winston-Salem that was spun off from R.J. Reynolds Tobacco. Where the tobacco giant had researched the use of nicotine to make people crave cigarettes, Targacept is focusing on the nicotine receptors in the brain to develop drugs for Alzheimer's disease and schizophrenia.
Whitaker said her salary is "significantly more" than the $13.40 an hour she made at the yarn factory.
"I'm not struggling now," she said. "Before, it was paycheck to paycheck."
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