Textile Manufacturing Sees Mild Gains in the South

McClatchy Newspapers:

In 2013, companies in Brazil, Canada, China, Dubai, Great Britain, India, Israel, Japan, Korea, Mexico and Switzerland, as well as in the U.S., announced plans to open or expand textile plants in Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.
The workers produce yarn, thread and fabric for apparel, furnishings, home products and industrial use. Examples include Huggies and Pampers diapers, Swiffer mops and Pledge furniture wipes, according to David Rousse, president of the Association of the Nonwoven Fabrics Industry.
"Textiles manufacturing - yarn, fabric, woven and nonwoven - is still here and growing," said A. Blanton Godfrey, dean of the College of Textiles at North Carolina State University. "We're selling cotton yarn cheaper than the Chinese."
True, textile manufacturing in the U.S. dropped precipitously in the 1990s and 2000s as cheaper labor drew jobs overseas. Automation and increased productivity of textile mills also cost jobs. More than 200,000 textile manufacturing jobs have been lost to automation in the last decade.
Textiles, mostly cotton, once dominated the economy of the South. Employment peaked in June 1948 with 1.3 million jobs. In just one state, North Carolina, 40 percent of its jobs were in textile and apparel manufacturing in 1940. By 2013, just 1.1 percent of that state's jobs were in textiles.
About 650 textile plants closed between 1997 and 2009, draining thousands of jobs and depressing communities.
But rising wages in China and other countries, combined with higher transportation costs and tariffs, have prompted foreign and domestic companies to consider American manufacturing sites. Also, with more consumers looking for the "Made in the USA" label, some companies are turning to American goods. Wal-Mart, for example, pledged last year to buy $50 billion over a decade in American-made products, among them towels and washcloths.
More than a third of all textile jobs were located in Georgia and North Carolina in 2012, and that's where many of the jobs are being created. The new plants are nothing like the dusty, noisy mills of the past.
These highly automated plants require far fewer - but more tech-savvy - workers who earn higher pay than their forebears.

Much like the heralded "reshoring" of manufacturing jobs, the number of jobs recently created here are massively overshadowed by the job losses over the last 3 decades, and technology assures that most of the lost jobs will never come back, but I'll take what good news I can where I can find it.  Mainly because looking at the past is really, really depressing:

TOP 10 STATES IN TEXTILE MANUFACTURING
The number of jobs in 2012 and the decline since 2002:
-Georgia: 45,154, down 46 percent from 2002
-North Carolina: 34,786, down 64 percent
-South Carolina: 18,701, down 67 percent
-California: 17,009, down 47 percent
-Alabama: 10,195, down 63 percent
-Texas: 8,584, down 27 percent
-Pennsylvania: 7,733, down 57 percent
-New York: 7,633, down 49 percent
-Virginia: 7,560, down 62 percent
-Tennessee: 6,016, down 50 percent
These 10 states account for 70 percent of the textile manufacturing jobs in the U.S.
SOURCE: Congressional Research Service

However, the war on middle class wages, along with the massive surge in energy costs, means that the U.S. is more competitive with China and other developing nations.  Expect that small numbers of textile and manufacturing jobs will return here going forward.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/02/06/217257/textile-industry-reviving-especially.html#storylink=cpy