An automat on a 1904 postcard
Posted on 09/22/2013 3:04:28 PM PDT by JerseyanExile
The old textile mills here are mostly gone now. Gaffney Manufacturing, National Textiles, Cherokee — clangorous, dusty, productive engines of the Carolinas fabric trade — fell one by one to the forces of globalization.
Just as the Carolinas benefited when manufacturing migrated first from the Cottonopolises of England to the mill towns of New England and then to here, where labor was even cheaper, they suffered in the 1990s when the textile industry mostly left the United States.
It headed to China, India, Mexico — wherever people would spool, spin and sew for a few dollars or less a day. Which is why what is happening at the old Wellstone spinning plant is so remarkable.
Drive out to the interstate, with the big peach-shaped water tower just down the highway, and you’ll find the mill up and running again. Parkdale Mills, the country’s largest buyer of raw cotton, reopened it in 2010.
The [Parkdale] mill here produces 2.5 million pounds of yarn a week with about 140 workers. In 1980, that production level would have required more than 2,000 people.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
It kills me to hear of the jobs illegals will have. By filling the jobs needed to keep the illegals here and alive.
An automat on a 1904 postcard
While automation means less jobs, someone is earning and spending. The trick is for the people who lose jobs to automation to learn to maintain and service the machines or find something else that people still want or even prefer to have done by hand.
Grew up about 45 minutes away from it.
Aren't we all? Isn't it a large part of why we're here?
Robofusion: Singapore's First and Only Robotic Ice Cream Machine
Where’s the “Bring Jobs back to America from China” FReeper? He/she needs to read this!
Give it time. I’m sure they will figure out a way to unionize machines and give them voting rights.
Become robot-designing engineers (mechanical, electrical, software) or perish.
Truth be told, politicians will fleece the engineers (producers) to give handouts to the rest who will be bonded in subsistence and indebtedness to perpetually vote for the same politicians.
My son recently graduated from Limestone College in Gaffney. He lives in Boiling Springs now ... we drive by the big peach every time we visit. Lovely country.
Are European fabrics better than American?
When I was stationed in Japan, in the late ‘80s, one could purchase beer from a vending machine :-)
100%
When I was trying to find a pic of it, there were several of the butt view. I decided against that, FR being family oriented and all.
” We could also help the unemployed by imposing a 29.5 hour work week. /s”
Obama’s on it.
Probably dead.
That moronic idea was at its height in the 60s and early 70s.
Even as a young man, that never made any sense to me.
It's not rocket science to see that everybody providing services for everybody else, with no one devising, designing and making things makes for a hilarious, but short lived society.
This is a hoot, in that it really shows the decline of American unions. And you can bet your bottom dollar that there is only going to be textiles in right to work states.
It started with the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, which merged with the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union in 1995, to form UNITE. In 2004, that organization merged with the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees union to form UNITE HERE.
In 2005, UNITE HERE withdrew from the AFL-CIO and joined the Change to Win Federation, along with several other unions, including the Teamsters, SEIU and the UFCW.
In May of 2009 union president Bruce Raynor (originally from UNITE) left UNITE HERE, taking with him numerous local unions and between 105,000 and 150,000 members, mostly garment workers. They formed a new Service Employees International Union (SEIU) affiliate called Workers United.
In September of 2009, UNITE HERE announced that it would re-affiliate with the AFL-CIO.
still can plus about a hundred other things - a hot coffee out of one of those machines on a cold night is a great comfort. never understood why heated cans didn’t catch on in the us
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