Some towns measure time as a state of constant expansion. In Eden, a mill town in North Carolina, life registers in terms of loss: the factories that closed and the jobs that went with them, the lives interrupted.
Janice Armstrong lost her job when one of Eden’s last giant textile companies closed its gates. After sputtering on for years through cutbacks and down-sizing, the Pillowtex company declared bankruptcy last year, and Armstrong’s lifetime of labour, 29 years spent folding and inspecting bedspreads, ended with a brief phone call from her supervisor. It was the only job she has ever had.
”I made a really good living, and I liked my job, and what is so bad is that we have come out with nothing after all those years,” she says. ”The day it closed, our insurance was gone, our pension was gone. It was devastating.”
The shutdown at Pillowtex was the largest single lay-off in North Carolina, with the loss of 4 800 jobs. Since then Armstrong has racked up her share of humiliation: job retraining classes at 52 and, with less than a high school education, having to admit after a lifetime of self-sufficiency that she has no money to get the washing machine repaired, and, on this day, lining up at first light to get a place in the queue at a food bank run by a local Baptist church.
Life does not promise to get any easier. In the last good years at Pillowtex, before the firm cut overtime and pay to try to stay afloat, Armstrong took home $13,50 an hour. She supported a stepdaughter and a grandchild, and helped out her ageing mother.
No one is paying those wages now in Eden. In Greensboro, 65km away, she was offered $6 an hour for work in a fast food restaurant. ”That wouldn’t cover the price of gas,” she says. Her unemployment benefit, which is $165 a week, barely covers her mortgage, and runs out in November. Armstrong hopes something will turn up before that. ”The only reason I am surviving is that I have savings,” she says.
Since July 2000 North Carolina has lost 175 900 factory jobs, according to the United States Bureau of Labour. Across the country, the US entered the deepest and longest recession the manufacturing sector has ever known, shedding 2,7-million jobs since 2001.
Fewer Americans now work in manufacturing than at any time since World War II. For North Carolina the decline has been especially cruel, with more people out of work proportionally than in the heartland of the US’s heavy industrial belt in the mid-west. A quarter of North Carolina’s manufacturing jobs have disappeared.
Economists say those jobs are unlikely to return because the industries that were North Carolina’s specialty — apparel and home furnishings — face intense foreign competition.
There was no mercy for Eden. The town of 16 000 lost 6 000 to 7 000 jobs over the past decade, says mayor Philip Price. Red brick factories on roads named for well-known brands of sheets and towels sit abandoned. Shops closed. The clubs where mill managers used to mix are desperate for new members. Attendance at the town’s 85 churches is dwindling.
And so a town where workers could live well was relegated to the underclass, where people struggle to find jobs, feed their families and pay for healthcare.
John Edwards, who was raised in a mill town 160km south of Eden, describes the divide between the haves and the newly created have-nots as the land of ”two Americas”. He has made the gap the central theme of his vice-presidential campaign. Although George W Bush won here by a convincing margin in 2000, the Democrats hope to whittle away his lead with Edwards’s Carolina credentials and his direct appeal to the dispossessed.
In Eden, their ranks are growing. A year ago a retired magistrate, Andrew Collins, set up a food bank at the Hampton Heights church in town. It was a modest undertaking at first; now most weeks he sends 400 people home with cartons of frozen meat, tinned food and bananas.
The people are young, old, African-American like Armstrong, and white. All say they could not manage without the handout; none feel confident that they will ever find full-time work again.
For Maria Coleman (61) it is simply too late, though she goes to the mandatory two job interviews a week. Thirty-four years ago, when she started at Pillowtex, it did not matter that she had not finished high school and had trouble reading. Now that is the only thing potential employers notice.
A few days ago she was offered a place on a course at the community college — in ice sculpture. Coleman has no illusions it will lead to a job. ”The factory got the best years of my life,” she says. ”All my life is hell now.”
Price insists that Eden is not lost. A boilermaker from Indiana is taking over an abandoned factory; an Israeli manufacturer of baby wipes is thinking of moving to town, attracted by the notion of a cheap workforce.
But the Edenites who can are leaving. ”The young people aren’t staying here,” says Price. ”There is a mass exodus of young people with any skills at all.”
Those left behind face diminishing options. Jason Anderson left school with a ninth grade education to work at a local car mechanic. Business fell off when the economy turned, and Anderson lost his job.
At 23 he is raising a three-year-old son, Rod. He is no longer with the child’s mother and says his parents are in no position to help financially. He worked as a house painter, leaving home at 4am to get to jobs, or sleeping overnight on building sites. Then he lost his car and now he is stuck in Eden. — Â