NYT: Textile Quotas to End Soon, Punishing Carolina Mill Towns [View All]

KANNAPOLIS, N.C. - Leann Harrington's experience losing her job has an all-too-familiar ring, one that is soon likely to be heard with even greater frequency.

The textile plant where she was employed shut down last year, a victim of fierce foreign competition. After scrambling, she was lucky to land a job as manager and waitress at the Towel City Junction Cafe, earning $3 an hour plus tips, a fraction of her factory wages.

For many years, textile and clothing factories in the mill towns of the Carolinas - originally drawn from New York and New England decades ago by the prospect of inexpensive nonunion workers - have been closing one after another as the industry migrated abroad in search of ever-cheaper labor. Now, this gradual loss may be about to turn into a rout.

On Jan. 1, the global system of country-by-country quotas regulating the $495 billion international trade in textiles and apparel is scheduled to be eliminated. That will transform the vast business in ways that were barely glimpsed a decade ago, when the newly created World Trade Organization went along with the demands of developing countries and agreed to phase out the quotas imposed by advanced nations to protect their own industries.

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Meanwhile, here in the slowly beating heart of the remaining American textile industry, workers and owners of factories still operating along a stretch of Interstate 85 from Charlotte to Greensboro see the dawning of 2005 as a death sentence. More companies, they fear, will go bankrupt. More communities will wither like Kannapolis, and thousands more workers will be desperate for training, employment and health insurance.

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http://nytimes.com/2004/11/02/business/02textile.html?hp&ex=1099371600&en=9511594a9458231c&ei=5094&partner=homepage