Cracks in the Social Net

“We left that city like the colonial powers left Africa,” lamented the ex-head of personnel at what was one of the largest textile mills in North Carolina. In 2003, the Pillowtex plant, based in the city of Kannapolis, closed and laid off its five thousand workers overnight. In a region where unionization was militantly discouraged, the mill provided an entire framework of life for the community it employed – administering everything from health care and tuition fees to garbage disposal and the painting of houses. Families invested two, three generations into the factory, forming an allegiance that threaded the social fabric of the town. But now, these workers, “many of whom had never traveled outside of North Carolina, were suddenly hearing the names of countries like China, India and Malaysia.” Losers in a worldwide contest for low-wages, few had high school diplomas, let alone skills that could translate into work in another industry. A reporter from Der Spiegel traveled to Kannapolis to examine the plight of the Pillowtex unemployed and the government’s fledgling attempts to rehabilitate them. Evoking parallels to the lives of those “in a collective in the former East Germany,” the article explores the “local” options available to America’s working poor, cast adrift by the corporations they solely depended upon and tossed about by the stormy imperatives of globalization. – YaleGlobal