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Posted on 09/06/2001 7:50:53 PM PDT by sarcasm

ICKORY, N.C. — In the spring of last year, the Century Furniture Company ran a help-wanted advertisement for upholsterers in six area newspapers. The company was offering good pay jobs in a region with thousands of experienced furniture workers, but not one applicant responded.

At the time, the unemployment rate in this manufacturing area of North Carolina was an extraordinarily low 2.2 percent. Anyone who wanted to work was doing so, and companies were raiding each other for experienced workers. New industries refused to move in, fearing they could not fill jobs.

But in just 12 months, Hickory's economy has moved through the looking glass. The region's main industries have slumped, and unemployment is at 7.2 percent, the nation's highest increase in joblessness over the past year. Century Furniture is no longer running help-wanted advertisements; workers are knocking on its doors. And the relationship between employers and employees has been transformed.

"Instead of employees being in the driver's seat, now we're in the driver's seat," said Bill McBrayer, the operations manager for the upholstery division of Lexington Home Brands, another large furniture maker with a plant across town. "It's a whole different feeling. Now, if you want to do something like clamp down on smoking in the plant, you can. Last year, people would just have quit."

Managers say productivity is up and workers are more motivated, fearful that layoffs might reach them, too. Employees ruefully acknowledge the change, and say they are stunned by the speed of their descent on the workplace see-saw.

"They cut us back from 60 hours to 36" in July, said Henry Stallard, who works at a large fiber-optic cable factory here and was looking for a second job at the county unemployment office this week to supplement his income. "They would never have done that last year. Now everybody's got to cross their T's and make sure they don't make any mistakes. Everything's totally flip-flopped."

While Hickory has been hit unusually hard, many production workers across the South and in other manufacturing states are facing tougher and more demanding environments than any they have known for the better part of a decade. And as layoffs continue to grow, employers will be asking more of workers, and the specter of future layoffs means they are likely to get it.

"When a worker has more at stake by losing his job, he's always willing to work much more efficiently," said Walter Wessels, a labor economist at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. "What's different this time is that the change is happening much more quickly than in the past. Employers are monitoring the market much more carefully now, and they know that if they don't get their employees to work harder in times like these, their competitors will."

This is not necessarily true of the entire economy. Ronald E. Bird, chief economist for the business-oriented Employment Policy Foundation in Washington, noted that jobs continue to grow in the services and information sectors, and he said that the current national unemployment rate of 4.5 percent was low by the standards of the last half-century.

But workers in manufacturing states are in many cases bearing the brunt of economic change. The nation has lost 837,000 manufacturing jobs since July 2000, by far the largest loss in any sector, and states that were recently thriving have been among the hardest hit. North Carolina has lost more such jobs than any other state, the flip side of enormous growth in the last 20 years, and it is here that the effects of rapid change are most visible. (Other states that have lost thousands of manufacturing jobs include California, Illinois, Michigan and Pennsylvania.)

The state's jobless rate is the highest since 1993, rising to 5.3 percent in July this year from 3 percent in July 1999. The Hickory metropolitan area, which has about 350,000 residents and is known as the Unifour, has by no means the highest unemployment in the state — 10 counties have double-digit unemployment, and 2 have more than 12 percent — but the growth of its unemployment has been greater than anywhere else in the nation. The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that joblessness in the four-county Hickory area grew by 4.5 percentage points in the last 12 months; the next highest was San Jose, Calif., where the rate grew by 2.5 percentage points.

This region has long been a capital of furniture and textile manufacturing, industries known for their unforgiving business cycles, but when the three largest manufacturers of fiber- optic cable began building factories in Hickory in the 1980's, the region's economic base seemed fully diversified. By last year, the nation's furniture capital was also producing 40 percent of the world's supply of fiber optics. But last summer all three industries hit a sharp decline almost simultaneously, beset by foreign competition and slowing demand for the older industries, as well as an oversupply of fiber-optic cable.

Nearly 1,000 fiber-optics workers in the area have lost their jobs this year, and there have been more than 2,000 layoffs in furniture, textiles and related industries. Ridgeview Inc., which has made socks in Catawba County for 89 years, closed its doors last year, putting 100 employees out of work. At the much smaller Jon- Scott Hosiery Company, where gray knitting machines spin white yarn into athletic socks, the entire third shift has been laid off, along with much of the second shift. Only a skeleton crew remains to mount the spools of yarn and box the socks.

"I don't know how long we're going to make it," said Bill Anderson, the head fixer at Jon-Scott's tiny factory on the west side of Hickory, where he spends the day moving among the machines, unimpeded by other employees. "We're down to about five people now, and they're shutting things down one or two weeks every month. It's been bad before, but I've never seen it like this."

J. D. Lane, 63, who ran a band saw at Fine Furniture, a chair manufacturer, in nearby Vale for 12 years, said he could not believe it when he was laid off a few weeks ago.

"I always figured there would always be a job for people like me," said Mr. Lane, who was one of 6,899 people to file new claims for unemployment insurance in Catawba County in July. "But now there's just nothing out there."

From the point of view of managers, however, the downturn has its advantages. Several company officials said the period of 2.2 percent unemployment hampered their ability to expand product lines, and it cost them dearly to train employees who left at the next attractive offer. Scott L. Millar, president of Catawba County's economic recruiting agency, said local leaders had to turn away new industry when everyone was working.

"We weren't sure we could provide labor to them, and we didn't want to tick off the industries that were here by having their work forces raided," Mr. Millar said. "Not to mention how many companies didn't even look at us. But now, with the bad publicity we've been getting because of the unemployment numbers, we're getting a lot more interest from potential prospects. I've had six calls in the last two days, and a lot of them wouldn't have been interested last year."

At Century Furniture, a high-end manufacturer that has so far avoided all but 14 managerial layoffs, managers say productivity is significantly higher than last year, and they do not expect to return to essentially full employment. "When you have unemployment at 2.2 percent, it's just not sustainable," said Robert J. Maricich, the president of Century. "Nobody can grow."

Looking back on the region's boom years, local officials now consider the period of full employment as much of an anomaly as the current downturn, the extremes of a business cycle writhing through a transition away from an old-fashioned factory economy. Though such thoughts may be of little comfort at the unemployment office, they reflect the widespread feeling in managerial offices about the usefulness of economic difficulty.

"There was a whole generation of workers in this region that had never experienced a challenge in finding and keeping jobs," Mr. Millar said. "They didn't understand that it wasn't normal. And frankly, I don't see it as unhealthy for a person to appreciate their job."

	NEWS ALERT
	Unemployment Rate Rises to 4.9 Percent in August (8:40 a.m.)

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