She was president of the Union of Needle Trades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE) at Cone Mills’ Salisbury plant. When word came that the plant was closing last year, Chattin told the Post she didn’t think finding other jobs would be much of a problem because Burlington and Pillowtex and other companies in the area needed people.

Chattin remembers that now.

“Things looked so good for everybody, but then once we lost our jobs and got out looking, we found out that hardly anybody paid what we made. And all those other companies had not announced closings.”

For Cindy, it has been a double whammy — or more. She’d been at Cone for 20 years, which put her in a high wage category. She is 45 years old, has health problems, and she had been union president, which she thinks made some potential employers uneasy.

When she started looking for a job, she says, “Nobody even called me for an interview.” She says she knows her union activity has hurt her job search. “When you are as vocal as I am, and you are out there, people see you. People know that stuff.”

She remembers talking to “some man at a job fair” who was representing a plant that needed a customer relations person. When she gave him her application, she told him she didn’t want him to look unfavorably on her union experience. “I saw him throw my application in the trash before I left,” she says.

Probably that was illegal, she says, but “anything illegal is only illegal if you get caught.”

Chattin looked for jobs “everywhere in Salisbury but Freightliner,” at least two places a week, from April until August.

She had a possibility, at $8.50 an hour, with Draftex, but when she turned it down, the labor review board in Raleigh agreed accepting that pay rate wasn’t feasible. Now, she says, they tell her even a job at $7.50 is feasible.

She was disappointed in the severance package the union got for workers, she said.

Where her union leadership wasn’t a problem, Chattin thinks her diabetes was. She says many jobs work on 12 hour shifts and companies wouldn’t hire people with diabetes for 12-hour shifts.

Finally, Chattin decided to go to school under the NAFTA benefits grant. “They make that very difficult,” she says, because you can’t work, you have to be a full time student, plus they would take your benefits. You basically have to live off unemployment.”

On unemployment, Chattin says she can’t afford health insurance, although with diabetes she really ought to have it. She has received grants for help with medications but can’t afford regular doctor visits to monitor her condition.

As for school, it’s a struggle, Chattin says. “The R-CCC accounting program, it’s hard, I’ll tell you that much. A lot of things I don’t understand about the college system, why you need to take so many different things.”

She’s taking an English course in which she has to rewrite for conciseness. “It’s a pretty difficult course and it is a lot of work. There are memos we have to redo and make up letters, resumes, give a presentation,” she says. “I never dreamed it would be like that. I thought you just took courses for what you wanted to do.”

In Chattin’s case, that includes jobs like accounts payable and inventory control.

Chattin is in her second semester, plans to go through the summer and hopes to finish by next Spring. “I couldn’t take a heavier load,” she says, “because accounting is a very difficult subject, more a management thing.”

At Cone, she was a machine operator. She pinpoints some of her difficulty in going to school and looking for a new job with the need to learn a new way of thinking. “I went from a place where they don’t condone using your brain to somewhere I’ve got to be doing what I haven’t been doing for 20 years.”

She doesn’t see her past union presidency as having encouraged her to use her brain. To go anywhere at Cone, she says, “you would have had to get out of bargaining-unit jobs,” and into management. But she thinks the company wanted to keep her as president of the union.

“The human resources manager and I had pretty good communication between us,” she says, “and pretty much kept things worked out without having to go to the extreme level.”

Her boyfriend, Gerald Knox, another ex-Cone employee and a union steward, with whom she shares a home, is in school too, learning heating and air conditioning. He’s also drawing unemployment. Knox applied for a job at Team Chevrolet, but found that training pay is only $5 an hour. “If I don’t sell cars, I am not going to make anything,” he told her, and decided taking the job was not feasible.

Whatever they end up doing, Chattin says she doesn’t want anything more to do with manufacturing.

“Everybody who is doing any kind of manufacturing is in danger,” she says. “I don’t want to see myself 10 years down the road hunting for a job. I have never had to go through this and I don’t ever want to have to do this again.”

Once Chattin thought she would like to work for a union, but figures unions are probably on the way out, too.