Goodman is 60 years old; he had worked at Cone 30 years — half his life — as a mechanic and overhauler. At the time he was laid off, his earnings had climbed to $12.10 an hour.

“I’ve got a job now,” he said, “but it doesn’t pay anything like I’m used to.”

Goodman is working in shipping at Alco Manufacturing and, although he keeps looking, he hasn’t been able to find anything that pays more or uses his skills. “I’m good at maintenance work,” he said. “I can tear about anything down and fix it.”

Goodman and his Cone Mills co-workers are part of a wave of Rowan workers thrown into job searches last year. As their traditional manufacturing jobs ended, they had to seek new positions. And they have found the search very different from when they first entered the job market decades ago.

They need greater skills and more education, they’ve learned. As they start over in new jobs, they’re having to be more flexible and —

Part of Goodman’s problem is his age, he said, and part is his lack of education. “If you ain’t got a high school education, people don’t want to put you to work, even if you’re good at the job.”

He had a perfect attendance record at work for 20 years, Goodman said, “but that’s no good.”

In his view, plant closings and downsizing are the direct result of plants in foreign countries. “These companies are taking all this manufacturing to different countries,” he said. “They are selling the country out. We used to call it treason, now the government pays them to do it. It’s not fair to the American people.”

Ruby Calder, who is 65 years old, has just re-signed for unemployment. She had been working at Cone for 28 years when the plant closed and was just months from retirement. At the time of the closing, she was making $10 an hour and questioned where else she could do that well. As it’s turned out, she hasn’t found anything else yet and doesn’t feel hopeful that she will.

“I don’t have much education, and mill work is about all I know,” she said.

Betty Sykes has been working in maintenance at Burlington Coat Factory in Charlotte since November, making $8 an hour, a drop from the $10 an hour she was earning after 15 years with Cone.

Sykes drives 38 miles to and from the job, a 55-minute drive each way. Before she went to Burlington, she worked at a bakery in Salisbury for $6 an hour, she said, but left when her boss got “kind of huggy.”

She is still hunting a better job closer to home, but said, “Jobs don’t pay nothing unless you go back to a cotton mill.”

Sykes keeps filling out job applications, she said, but“nobody is hiring right now. Sometimes they call you, sometimes they don’t.”

Human resources expert Fran Lilly said people like Goodman, Calder and Sykes are “casualties of the shift from the manufacturing era to the era where human capital is measured in terms of intellectual capacity, as opposed to physical capacity.”

Lilly is a senior professional in human resources. She worked for the Tallahassee Democrat and the Florida Bankers Association and served as consultant to some manufacturing firms over 20 years. Now she teaches human resource management at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte.

She said the shifting demand for more and more technical skills is just beginning. “Changes in knowledge are happening so fast, you are out of date in five years if you are not making a concerted effort to keep up.”

Even today’s higher education won’t guarantee employability for long, she said. “If students are not sharpening their saws as they walk out the university doors, they are quickly out of date.”

Lilly sees social skills as the strongest feature of older workers whose manufacturing skills are no longer in demand and who don’t have the time or ability to learn new higher tech skills. She said these can be taught and sees jobs in areas like customer service. “The pluses for these kinds of people are they have reliability, and things we find some of the younger generations don’t have —being courteous, attentive, willing to listen to someone. That’ssomething they have that is currently marketable.”

Betty Freeman is trying to learn marketable skills in the accounting program at Rowan-Cabarrus Community College. She said the mill pays for the education but she lives on unemployment benefits while she is getting it. After 15 years at Cartex and 19 at Cone, where she was earning $11 an hour for monitoring a computer, she is having trouble living on unemployment and staying on top of her classes.

School is turning out to be tougher than she expected, she said. Last semester she made all A’s and B’s. She’s not so sure about this semester, taking computer classes, accounting and English.

Freeman said she was hoping for “some kind of job that you sit down and mess with figures.”There’s a lot more to accounting than that, she said. “It isn’t what anybody thinks it is. Accounting is about laws. I was wanting (to be) more like a book keeper.”But she doesn’t think many such jobs exist any more, so she’s plugging along in school. “It’s 35 years since I’ve been in a class,” she said. “They don’t teach stuff like they used to. You have to do more to get it on your own.”

Freeman is 54 years old. In “American Business and Older Employees,” the AARP reports ontheir research about how businesses perceive older employees — those 50 years old or older. The report said human resource managers tend to believe older employees lack flexibility in doing different tasks and are reluctant to participate in training programs, try new approaches and learn new technology. Because of that, many business are not using older workers effectively.

The report says older workers “need to be mindful of how they can continue to develop professionally.”

In the new millennium, the report says, the economy will not reward length of time on a job as much as it will “the ability of workers to use information in innovative ways.”

Gary Lofthus is a good example of a worker heading in that direction before he actually falls into the “older” category, while helping other workers do the same.

Lofthus worked for 12 years at Cone Mills in human resources and product safety. After he lost that job, Lane Dyer, manager of the Rowan County Employment Security Commission, put him in touch with Standard Corporation Integrated Logistics. KoSa has subcontracted its warehouse operation to Standard. Lofthus became general manager for Standard at KoSa. In this arrangement, Standard provides the labor using KoSa’s facilities, Lofthus said.

In the beginning he had to fill 138 positions with people who could do jobs like run forklifts with computers on them. Within eight months, he had hired 232 people, many recently laid off from Cone, American &Efird, Fuchs and York International.

“I was very fortunate to get a good job here at KoSa,” Lofthus said. “It was my duty to help those people out there.”

Of the 232 workers he hired, Lofthus said 111 did not stay long. Some of the reasons they didn’t work out included expecting the same status and rate of pay they’d had in their earlier jobs and an inability to deal with change.

Being laid off turns people upside down, Lofthus said, “and gives a feeling of not having a home. They had a job and all of a sudden it left them.” He compared the feeling to a divorce.

The people who stayed with the Standard jobs are better off than they were before, Lofthus said, because they have stability, good benefits and an opportunity to advance. He has a budget to teach leadership training, computer skills and communication skills.

For example, Renee Campbell came to Standard to handle traffic, a highly computerized job, better than being a clerk in maintenance at Cone, she said. “It was a big change but it’s been a good change.”

Steve Sifford, who now operates an automatic process recorder, had been at Abex. He learned the computer skills he needed in the Standard operation. “I love it,” he said.

And age didn’t keep Hugh Sloan from getting hired. He retired after 30 years with KoSa, then came back to work with Standard as a lead beam loader operator. “I figured I had a few good years left for a job,” he said.

Lofthus said Standard’s focus is “middle-of-the-road labor” that will involve training for most new employees, and he expects his operation to expand to 300 or 400 people in two or three years. The current pay scale is $8.75 to $11 for middle-of-the-road work, and $12 to $14 for what Lofthus called “talented” workers in more complicated jobs. He said Standard also provides excellent medical and retirement benefits.

Lofthus said KoSa’s “innovative management” has been a “real driving force” in the cooperative venture between KoSa and Standard.

Innovation implies change.

And, in Fran Lilly’s words, change means that to stay employed there or anywhere, workers will have to keep “sharpening their saws.”