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 ...
Just maybe people will eat at home and/or brown bag lunches.
Limestone is a very good school. I live in Gaffney and work in the textile industry. My company (www.hamrickmills.com) is not mentioned in the article, but it has been around for 100 years. The secret to their success? They never go into debt. As for the peach, it has been the butt of jokes around here for 30 years.
Yup. Horn and Hardart on 57th and 6th.
“Read an article that said MCD is working on adding more automation to their stores. Makes a lot of sense.”
Was at a local “Steak & Shake” restaurant a while back and counted 29 workers in the store. I can’t imagine how they are turning a profit with that many employees. A different employee seated you, waited on you, delivered you food and rung up the tab. I am self employed and can’t even think of having an employee.
Robots don't eat burgers, or wear clothes, or live in houses, or drive cars, etc.
Will the entire world be on welfare, supported by our robot masters?
No one can say with certainty, of course, but I remember reading in a dusty old book once that "Idle hands are the Devil's playground." I'm sure nothing good will come of it.
I watched that movie a couple of hours ago, never seen it before.
Funny!
The trick is to get out of the rat race altogether. Find a small piece of land and plant a garden with a few chickens and some sheep or goats. Stop working for others and work for yourself instead.
doesn’t look big enough from that angle
You can used panties and probably more perverted stuff too
Ewww. Well I wasn’t interested in finding anything like that.
Conventional wisdom in plant for last decade or so was that hand labor was the most flexible and cost efficient solution at a rate of about $16.50 per hour for a job with good healthcare ext, which is a very good wage in our part of the country .
With all of the new rules, regulations, ObamaCare, ext, added up and costed out, human labor is no longer cost competitive so we are investing in extensive automation which cut our labor force needs by about 75%.
I am sure our company is not alone in this realization, so as companies expand their business there will be an overwhelmingly strong incentive to use automation and robotics in place of employees where ever feasible.
We will probably also be forced to hire as many part time workers as possible to avoid the economically devastating new regulatory and cost burdens from legislation passed during the years when the Democrats controlled the House and Senate and Obama took office.
The policies of the Democrats and the Obama Administration imposed on the country ‘to help working people’ are going to result in the massive loss good paying full time jobs with good benefits.
Back in the day, Bruce Springsteen sang a song called "My Hometown" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6LABdHtkUA about the loss of traditional jobs in smoke stack industries that Union work rules help destroy where he sang, “....foreman say these jobs are going boys, and they ain't coming back...to your home town...”
That's just what is happening now in the work force because employers, already weakened by 5 years of hard economic hard times, are faced with cutting workforce because the Obama Administration has driven the costs of labor to the point it's unaffordable or have their business go out of business.
Business is beginning to come back to the United States but the ill advised policies of the Obama Administration is making sure that the kind of good paying jobs that fueled the American Dream and supported a large, well educated Middle Class are not coming back like they used to and are going to be harder and harder to find.
A large number of small business owners have been operating a close to break even for the last five years , hoping that the economy will turn around and business will come back.
A lot of those owners now see that things are not coming back and they have to adjust to what Obama and the Media tout as "the New Normal" either by going out of business, or adjusting their labor force.
America used to be a country with a large middle class and small under class and small upper class.
Obama is killing the middle class in this country and seems to want to re make the country into a small upper class Elite presiding over a large, welfare addicted, uneducated lower class.
Amazingly, the latest generation seems to welcome a life of government dependency and are OK with the New Normal
This will be the legacy of the Obama Administration and they are doing it on purpose.
heh
Daughter went to Converse so we passed it many times and called the big butt in the sky. LOL
Between the time I started work in my industry and when I retired 43 years later, the number of people in our plants was drastically reduced through automation.
You read my mind.....pinging him now.
1. American labor is very expensive.
2. Electricity costs have declined considerably in many parts of the country as new sources of natural gas have come online in recent years.
Amen brother.
By the way, love the excellent photos and the cool pooches. Stay safe.
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