ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, September 15, 1996 TAG: 9609130205
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: MARTINSVILLE
SOURCE: JEFF STURGEON
Textile industry layoffs by the thousands have pinched the people of Martinsville and Henry County in ways few other communities in the state have known.
DuPont is the most recent textile company to announce plans to slash an industrial payroll, saying last month it will lay off 550 of its 600 employees as it closes its 55-year-old Henry County nylon plant by mid-1998.
It's an area where textile work is king. Nearly 22 percent of all jobs are in plants making apparel and domestic textiles, compared to 1 percent for the state as a whole. But this mainstay industry is shrinking. In Martinsville and Henry and Patrick counties - which is considered a single employment market - textile companies employed 9,750 people during the fourth quarter of last year, down 2,200 from the same period in 1992, according to the Virginia Employment Commission.
The jobless rate has risen from 7 percent in 1992 to 8.2 percent last year - nearly 4 points higher than the state's rate of 4.5 percent.
But along with weathering such storms, the community seems to have found a recipe for returning the victims of layoffs and plant closings to work: Take public and private schools that offer work-related training programs and add about $1 million in federal money to pay student expenses for tuition and books. Finally, call on the workers-turned-students to supply the perseverance to learn a new skill and find a job in that field.
It is a formula that has changed the careers and lives of several hundred people in the area and is a lesson for workers elsewhere in Western Virginia as traditional manufacturing jobs become threatened by technology and competition from world trade.
In the stories that follow, three people tell how their lives were impacted or will be affected by the elimination of textile jobs. Carlos Thomas, casualty of a 1993 layoff at Sara Lee Knits Products has become a heating and cooling system technician. Sylvia Nibblett, laid off just six months ago by Sara Lee, attends college classes on the administration of justice, and Charles R. Brown Jr. just got word he soon will be out of a job at DuPont's nylon plant. He is wrestling over his options in his mind.
Carlos Thomas: Retrained - Working again, thanks to God and college
Danville Community College and the power of prayer brought Carlos Thomas back from the loss of his job at a Martinsville textile factory.
The college trained him in a new field while God kept the lights on and food in the cupboard, is the way he tells it.
Thomas is a single dad with a 5-year-old daughter at home and couldn't have made it working for $4.35 an hour at Taco Bell.
Today you'll find him at B&H Heating & Cooling in Collinsville, where he bends sheet metal into ducts and fixes climate-control units.
Thomas, 30, is a former sewer and inspector in a textile factory. He used his layoff as the impetus to change careers. As his case illustrates, it takes a hearty - if not higher - spirit to bridge the gap between jobs while juggling school.
Thomas punched out from a Sara Lee Knits Products sewing plant in Martinsville for the last time in January 1993. The plant later closed.
He had worked there for about 5 1/2 years, earning varying wages up to $15 an hour. But wage cuts before his layoff dropped that to $5 an hour. He was already hurting financially when he lost his paycheck altogether.
How he coped with less income is a story of a man who, each time he was about to go under, found "a door would always open," Thomas said.
Not long after being terminated, he opened his mailbox and found a $2,600 federal income tax refund that prevented the bank from taking away his house trailer for missed loan payments.
"Wooo!" he said, recalling his excitement.
His dad waived the rent on his trailer lot. The mother of his daughter, to whom Thomas was never married, paid him child support. He collected unemployment. He borrowed.
He learned through a fellow member of his church about the Central Piedmont Private Industry Council in Martinsville, which distributes federal grants to laid-off workers.
The program ultimately paid his tuition at Danville Community College for three years through this summer. The program also helped with books, baby-sitting expenses and gas for his car to defray the cost of commuting the 80 miles to and from school.
He hired on at a local Taco Bell and entered a work-study program at the school, but as a single father, he couldn't stand being away from his daughter Beverly, now 5, the 15 hours a week that his two jobs took. Thomas quit working while in school.
He decided to become a technician in the heating, ventilation and cooling trade, even though as a child he was afraid of wires and natural gas. He had taken mechanical trades courses earlier, and the outlook for work was good.
In his job, which he began last summer, he makes $7.50 an hour, according to the council.
He finds his skills are a commodity in the job market. Unlike when he first looked for a textile job - a process that involved searching for an opening - heating and cooling companies were calling the college to hire its graduates, he said. The phasing-out of polluting refrigerants under new environmental standards has created extra work for companies like B&H Heating & Cooling.
"You can't put all your confidence in textiles, because it's no sure thing," Thomas said. "You think, 'It's a factory.' You put all your security in it. You say, 'This is where I'm going to retire ... Got me a pension, some stock.' And all of a sudden the rug just came out from under."
With raises, he can pay his debts within two years, he said.
"The bill collectors will be happy."
Charles R. Brown Jr.: Facing a Future Layoff - 'I don't want to head in the wrong direction'
When Charles R. Brown Jr. sits down for lunch, it's usually with four fellow workers hunched over the same table in the DuPont nylon factory in Henry County.
Brown buys a tray of food in the plant's cafeteria. It's pretty good most days and great when taco salad is the daily special.
That's from a man with 17 years on the job. Brown also returns to the same parking place in the unassigned lot each morning when he reports. Here, though, change is in the wind. Layoffs are emptying the parking lot - gradually.
This didn't affect Brown personally until he learned last month that he also will be cut from the payroll in a year or two. Nylon industry turmoil will spell an end to the taco salads, his laughs with lunchtime pals and what he thought was a career with one of America's industrial giants.
He is a technician, maintaining instruments that monitor the quality of the nylon fiber the plant makes primarily for women's hosiery.
DuPont intends to fire 550 of its 600 employees there. They will leave for reasons that are not their fault, but in order to close the factory by mid-1998. The Wilmington, Del., company is consolidating nylon making into fewer plants elsewhere to compete better on the world market. The Henry County plant is DuPont's oldest nylon operation, having opened in 1941. And it has been the subject of shutdown speculation for many years.
Brown, 43, said he is in line for nine months' pay as severance benefits. He will use it to find a new career.
Although he will miss DuPont, "I do enjoy challenges. That is what makes life that much better," Brown said.
It's just that this challenge has more riding on it than almost anything else in his life.
A supervisor called Brown and his co-workers into a room at the plant on Aug. 26 to break the news of the expected plant closing. DuPont has said the plant was losing money and a candidate for closure. Brown went home that night and sat his family down in the living room.
His wife, Peggy, a school speech pathologist, isn't worried. She told him, "You will have no trouble finding a job," Brown recalled. Friends and relatives say that too, and his son, Stephen, 13, did not seem overly concerned.
The words of support comfort Brown, but his layoff date - still undetermined - bobs on the horizon of his mind like a black buoy. "Sometimes that's a little scary," he said. "Some of the skills I have, for the local area, are not viable. There's not a big demand for them."
He holds an electronics degree and knows how to run a computer to operate equipment or design graphic images. He built his home, is a woodworker and can drive a fork lift, among other things. Brown's question is, what career doors are open and which one leads up? Can he cover long-term living expenses and future costs such as his son's first year of college or other advanced schooling in about five years?
"What I am looking at now is, 'Which way should I go?'" Brown said. "I'm 43 now. I don't want to head in the wrong direction at this point in time."
And, "even with the skills, it's still hard."
He wanted to go the 15 more years he needed for a DuPont retirement, but it's not going to happen.
He can see himself as a college student - sort of. "I'm a person that likes to go out and do rather than read," he said. But he would go to class to land a good job.
For starters, he's vowed to quit smoking.
Brown used to smoke a pack a day. Now his son rations him two cigarettes daily. If agreeing to that strict regimen is a sign of what he is made of, Brown says he's prepared for his mid-life career change.
SYLVIA NIBBLETT: A CHANCE FOR CHANGE - Making the most of new opportunity
Six months out of her old textile job, Sylvia Nibblett is a book-toting college student who likes making grades better than garments.
She was swept out of work in the last wave of layoffs at the Sara Lee Knits Products plant in Martinsville. It closed last March 15, made obsolete by its age and competition from foreign trade.
Soon after being one of 400 employees shown the door, the 30-year-old Bassett resident enrolled in an administration of justice program at Patrick Henry Community College in Martinsville.
How her life has changed. Before, she spent her days inspecting a stream of sweat shirts, sweat pants, shorts and T-shirts. Now when her energy is spent, it is on homework for the five classes she is carrying.
When she worked for Sara Lee, lint from the factory rode home with her on her clothes and hair. Even her nostrils attracted the tickly fibers.
No more. She has put her factory grubbies - T-shirts and jeans - in a closet. There is a collar on her shirt now and a cleanliness about her jeans.
Nibblett could have gone to work in another textile factory nearby. But after four years she was through doing that kind of hard, dirty work without chance of promotion. She said she felt turned on and off like a machine by the routines of production.
"You never felt like an individual," she said. "The real me was dying on the inside. I was trying to be what Sara Lee wanted me to be so I could keep my job. I didn't know how to get out until I got this opportunity."
She shakes her head at the thought of what might have happened if the plant stayed open. "We'd have probably stayed there till ..."
Seated at a table in the college cafeteria, she said she felt light years from the shop floor. A book, "The American System of Criminal Justice," sat on top of a folder of handwritten notes.
"I am putting all I got into this. I want to do the best I can," she said. "I love feeling in control instead of someone controlling me."
She is seated with several other identically situated women, all Sara Lee workers turned students.
"Mentally, we've changed," she said. There are nods and uh-huhs from the others.
"I personally feel it is OK for me to set goals for myself and go after them." Before, there would have been no point to goal-setting.
Nibblett had never been to college because she couldn't afford it. The federal government is paying the roughly $1,500-per-semester cost of her tuition and books, because it instituted a policy some years ago of helping people who lose their jobs to rising imports.
Financially, this will not be easy. The money at Sara Lee was good, about $13 per hour at times. Nibblett collects about 35 percent less money through her unemployment check than she made during the best times at the factory. Because her husband is not working due to a disability, she later may need to work while in school.
Yes, she would make textiles again. "I could go in there with a different attitude now," she said. "At the end of the big picture, I've got something waiting for me."
She expects to receive a degree in the spring of 1998. She intends to work as a therapist for children involved in drug or alcohol abuse, after following up her degree with counseling training.
"I can finally be me," she said.
LENGTH: Long : 218 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: NHAT MEYER. 1 Thomas, Nibblett, Brown. color.by CNB