Rosa Carter thought she was in pretty good shape financially. Her kids are grown. She owns her double-wide in Woodleaf and she enjoyed her job at Color-Tex.
But after the plant closed without warning at the end of September, her world shifted. She still has her own home, but the cost of heating it is eating her alive. She’s not buying much in the way of groceries, and she’s not sure she can keep up the payments on her modest, late-model car.
She doesn’t have health insurance, and she’s juggling her medications to keep the cost of prescription drugs down.
Carter’s situation is not uncommon in Rowan County. About 2,000 people lost jobs in the county during the past year, and for many of them, finding a comparable new job is somewhere between difficult and impossible.
Because of the changes and the effects it had on people and the community, the Salisbury Post’s editorial board picked that group of displaced workers as the newspaper’s Newsmakers of the Year.
The situation changed fast.
One minute unemployment in Rowan County was so low that officials worried about having enough available workers to attract new industry. In April 2000, people at a presentation of the Work Force Development Profile study — sponsored by Rowan-Cabarrus Community College and the chambers of commerce in Rowan and Cabarrus counties — joked that when Burger King has a sign offering new employees a signing bonus of $500 you know the market’s tight.
The unemployment rate in the county declined for about 10 years, dropping from a high of 5.5 percent in 1991 to 2.7 percent in 1998. Officials said they consider “full employment” about 4 percent.
Unemployment in Rowan County at the time of the work force presentation was 2.5 percent. Officials at the presentation said such low figures leave an area with no “flexible” work force available to fill jobs that open up.
A line in the study said, “These low unemployment rates indicate the pool of jobless workers available for employment are those with the fewest skills.” It emphasized that employers will need workers with new technical skills in the future.
The study was based on the assumption that the average rate of growth that occurred between the years 1991-1998 would continue in Rowan and Cabarrus counties over the years 2000-2005 and did not express alarm about people losing jobs.
But at almost the same time, job cutbacks were coming in large numbers and rapid succession. Between the end of January 1999 and October 2000, the following plants closed:
- Frito Lay, 93 jobs
- Cone Mills, 625 jobs
- Burlington Industries in Iredell, 775 jobs
- Carolina Maid, 45 jobs
- American & Efird, 111 jobs
- York International, 107 jobs
- Ball Metal Beverage Container Corp., 125 jobs
- Pillowtex Salisbury plant, 160 jobs
- Color-Tex, 360 jobs
- Federal-Mogul, 178 jobs
These plants laid off workers:
- KoSa, 50 jobs (KoSa is now rehiring)
- Fuchs, 59 jobs
- Oakwood Homes, 271 jobs
- Grinnell/Hersey, 50 jobs
- Freightliner, 1,304 jobs
- Auto Truck Transport, 75 jobs
At first it seemed the county could keep pace, reabsorbing the displaced workers. The Rowan Employment Security Commission helped 1,521 people get jobs between August 1999 and February 2000, although typically people found their new jobs didn’t pay as well as the jobs they’d lost.
Ultimately, the supply of manufacturing workers outstripped the demand for them. Unemployment jumped to 8.9 percent for September and climbed even higher, to 9.5 percent in October. Employment Security people said the rates were inflated as Freightliner and other plants filed short-term claims for temporary lay-offs.
The rate for November was down to 5.5 percent, the same as it was 10 years ago, not full employment, but not as high as the 14.5 percent in Swain County. The statewide rate is 3.7 percent, somewhat higher than it has been but still relatively low.
November is the first month in which Freightliner’s permanent layoffs figure.
As part of a joint effort to help laid-off workers find new jobs, Rowan-Cabarrus Community College and the Employment Security Commission developed on-going classes in how to hunt for jobs, how to interview and, especially, how to retrain for new kinds of work. The college offers classes in computer training and other areas where workers are in demand.
Jeanie Moore, associate vice president for instruction and continuing education at the community college, said the retraining efforts start at the Job Link Center at the Employment Security Commission. At the center, Rowan-Cabarrus and several county agencies, including Department of Social Services, Vocational Rehabilitation, Rowan-Salisbury Schools and Community Service Council, try to help people pick classes to get the job they want.
“In general, I think it’s going fairly well for those that are taking advantage of it,” she said. “It’s a matter of getting people comfortable with coming back into an academic environment and not being intimidated by it and helping them find that niche where they can be successful.
“The typical response has been that many of these folks aren’t sure what they’re going to do. Then it takes them a while to muddle through the process, and they come in individually.”
So far, Rosa Carter isn’t finding it helpful. To draw unemployment, she has to apply for at least two new jobs a week and attend sessions at Rowan-Cabarrus on writing resumes and interviewing.
She says it all adds up to more driving than she can afford and hasn’t produced any job possibilities for which she’s suited. Her daughter writes her resumes, Carter says, and she isn’t impressed with being told not to wear big earrings on job interviews. “That’s how I dress,” she says. “That’s me. I know not to dress like that in the plant, for safety.”
Rosa has spent all her adult life in manufacturing. When she was 18 years old, she went to Burlington Mills. The plant closed. She worked at Cannon’s Swink plant. Then after a stint at Celanese, she went to Color-Tex (though it was Fieldcrest at the time), where she’d been settled in for the past 20 years.
“I’m a mill worker,” she said. “That’s all I’ve ever done.” And it’s work she likes.
At age 53, she’s skeptical about starting over in a new kind of work, but even in manufacturing, she’s limited by serious arm injuries she once suffered on the job. They prevent her from lifting more than 25 pounds. Most manufacturing jobs require more than that, she said, so even if she can find a manufacturing job, she may not be able to do it.
If she hasn’t found a manufacturing job by the time her unemployment runs out, Carter thinks maybe she’ll have to work in a convenience store. “But that isn’t me,” she says.
She doesn’t want to move away, either, because she has family — children, grandchildren, her mother and an aunt — all within a few miles. Two or three brothers also worked at Color-Tex.
“I’m too old to leave home,” she says. “This is where I come from. When I die, this is where I’m going to leave from.”
Dr. Louis Kandl, a Stanly County physician specializing in the care of older patients, said he’s seen patients who worked in the same mill job for many years move on to something else successfully. But he questions trying to train them in areas different from what they’ve done.
“A person who has used machinery can learn a different kind of machine,” he said, “or maybe something involving human relations if they’ve been used to working with other people.”
He especially wonders about training older workers for computer jobs. “Younger people who are used to them don’t know how alien computer stuff is,” she said.
That doesn’t mean older workers can’t go to different kinds of work. “After 20 years of doing the same thing, a person does feel anxiety over change, but sometimes they actually do better when they find another type of work,” Kandl said.
He doesn’t necessarily see slowness to adapt to computers as a problem.
“A computer doesn’t talk with people. It doesn’t clean up. It doesn’t build things,” he said. “Somebody’s got to do some of the other stuff.”
Some Color-Tex employees are finding non-computer jobs, doing something different from what they used to do, though not at the rate of pay they lost.
Tony Gegorek was a supervisor in the dye house; now he’s learning cafeteria management in the Rowan-Salisbury Schools. He’d had earlier experience in cafeterias, so he isn’t starting in a totally unknown field.
Gegorek says he’s nowhere near his earlier income, and it’s going to take him a while to dig out of the hole Color-Tex left him. But he likes the work and hopes to end up managing a cafeteria for one of the schools.
Terry Penley worked in plant maintenance as a mechanic and carpenter at Color-Tex. His new job with the city of Salisbury at Town Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant uses similar skills in a different environment. He doesn’t earn as much here as he did at Color-Tex either.
Neither of these men is trying to return to manufacturing because they say there’s none to return to.
The problem isn’t unique to Color-Tex employees, though this is the most recent example of manufacturing’s instability in Rowan County and the one that’s left its workers in the worst shape, with unpaid health insurance and no pay for the last week they worked.
Manufacturing came to the Southeast “chasing cheap labor” a century ago, according to Dr. John Connaughton, a professor and analyst in economics at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and is now moving on as part of the same chase. He said that both manufacturing and selling are now global, and the old manufacturing economy is over, not just in Rowan County, but in the United States.
Another analyst in economics at UNC-Charlotte sees a positive future.
Dr. Tony Plath, associate professor in the Department of Finance and Business Law, called Rowan County a labor market in transition. “As a consequence, you have a time in which the dislocation exceeded the amount of new jobs created,” he said. “You are losing before gaining, but you will begin to pick up new industries, new sources of jobs.”
Plath said the irony is that the job market elsewhere in the area seems like “the land of plenty,” but the kinds of positions that are increasing aren’t in this market yet. When they do, they’ll be in technology, construction and service, not manufacturing, he said. Nor will all the jobs come at the level of fast-food restaurants, though some will.
“Municipal leaders will find ways to identify what you’re good at and try to bring appropriate industry. They’ll bring in some you haven’t seen before,” he said.
Plath cited a need for such skilled labor such as brick masons and carpenters all the way up the I-85 corridor as growth, development and building continue. These jobs will be close enough for Rowan County workers to take them, Plath said.
He also predicted rising wages because of increased demand — but not in manufacturing. He said the economy will probably continue strong.
Although the economy slowed more than expected in the year past, Plath cited three stimuli he thinks will keep it from slowing down more in 2001. First, he said lower interest rates are “virtually certain in January.”
Also, he said Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan will probably support George W. Bush’s $1.3 trillion tax cut as a “fiscal policy stimulus.”
Finally, Plath said voter approval of $4.4-billion in construction bonds for universities as well as state and local bonds will bolster the economy and job market.
“You have multipliers in economics,” he said. “When people get better jobs, they buy things, go on vacation, go to physicians. When you getone increased dollar of spending, the dollar multiplies itself through the economy.”
From his view in Charlotte, Plath said the labor market is tight, though he acknowledged that’s little comfort to an unemployed person in Salisbury.
“It’s like a tornado, all the buildings standing on one side, chaos on the other side.”
Lane Dyer, who was manager of the Rowan office of the Employment Security Commission at the time Cone Mill closed, agrees with Plath’s suggestion that people may have to go farther afield to find work. Dyer has moved on to become district manager and, like Plath, now sees a broader picture. But he sees it from the point of view of the local unemployed worker, too.
“I think there are still many jobs out there. A lot of job orders are coming in, and a lot of companies are still hiring in the area,” he said. “It’s harder right now than it was this time last year. We recovered without any problem last year. This time it is harder. People of a certain background and educational level may have a mind-set that makes it extremely difficult to find something new. Some people may not be willing to make a change.”
Out-of-work people will probably have to do something different, learn something new, maybe go back to school to find jobs, Dyer said.
He acknowledges the problems this creates for some people. “There are strict requirements for school. We won’t approve just any course of study. It has to be something in which we think they have a realistic chance of getting a job. It has to be something they can complete in a certain period of time,”Dyer said. “They often collect unemployment while in school, but they have to be able to survive through the entire course of study.”
Because the work situation in Cabarrus County is still good, Dyer and Plath said, people will find jobs by looking a little farther from home. “The situation is not quite as good as a year ago, but there is still a job out there for every person who will make a really good effort to find one. I never met a person who didn’t get a job if they kept trying. With enthusiasm and a good attitude, sometimes you can get hired even without skills if the employer sees you want to learn.”
Plath said he thinks people will look back on the year 2001 and say, “Wow, what a great year.”
TOMORROW: After Color-Tex closed, Terry Penley found a job with the city of Salisbury.
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