U.S. Textile Mills Compete Globally with Advanced Technology
July 6, 2010 Reuters
To get an idea of how some U.S. textile mills can compete with developing-world rivals who pay far lower wages, roll a bowling ball down one of the production lines at Parkdale Mills’ Walnut Cove yarn plant.
Chances are you won’t hit anybody, though you may have to foot the bill for some pricey equipment repairs.
The 200,000-square-foot (18,580-sq-metre) plant runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, turning out 1.5 million pounds (680,400 kg) of cotton yarn every week with a staff of just 71 people spread over three shifts. On the overnight shift, just 11 people run the plant, which sprawls over an area about the size of four football fields.
What’s the secret? Constant investment in automation equipment that allows the highly profitable plant to make more yarn with fewer skilled workers at a price low enough that it can export it to Honduras and the Dominican Republic, where it is knit into T-shirts to be sold by customers including Canada’s Gildan Activewear Inc.
The environment, where hundreds of machines churn away with little human intervention, is worlds away from what plant manager B.B. McGuire saw when he started his first, part-time job in a textile factory in 1973.
“We used to have people running all over each other,” recalled McGuire, 53.
The latest new equipment at the 19-year-old plant, located in a town of 1,465 people near North Carolina’s rural northern border, automates a process of moving rough yarn into the final round of spinning, allowing the four workers to do a job that needed 15 to 20 people with the old gear.
“It wasn’t bad equipment, it’s just that the technology has been updated,” said McGuire. “We couldn’t be competitive without this type of technology.”
The factory has reduced its staff by about 40 percent over the past five years, while boosting production, McGuire said.
While productivity improvement is a goal for pretty much every American manager, the drive is particularly zealous at textile companies like Parkdale, and with good reason. Mills have been falling likes flies in this country. According to industry lobbying group the National Council of Textile Organizations, more than 200 have closed since 2005, when the nations of the World Trade Organization agreed to drop the quotas that once regulated the global trade in fabric and clothing.
But if the industry has declined, it hasn’t disappeared. About 410,000 Americans still worked in textile and apparel manufacturing as of May — more than worked in broadcasting or making electric appliances — according to government data. Still, that represents about one-quarter of the 1.6 million people who worked in apparel and textile factories back in 1990.
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