Thread: Now the RESENTMENT TO CHINESE WORKERS 1

Resentment
 Laid-off worker cites losing job to Chinese workers in virtual slavery

 BY PAUL B. JOHNSON
 ENTERPRISE STAFF WRITER
  PLEASANT GARDEN – Cindy Justice’s resentment still sim*mers nearly a year after she found out she’d lose her long*time furniture factory job.
  What adds to her pain is what happened to her work and the jobs of 280 beloved co*workers. It was taken across the globe to be done by people who have little chance to bet*ter their lives, she said.
  Hooker Furniture Corp. closed its Pleasant Garden production plant last year. The company, which also closed a plant in Kernersville in 2003, has been candid in saying that cheaper overseas production costs have led to the shut down of domestic plants.
  For Justice, who worked in customer service at the Pleas*ant Garden factory for 12 years, losing jobs to China means that little positive came out of her devastating experience.
  “That’s a shame that those people over there are worked like slaves,” she said.
  Hooker officials say they maintain humane working conditions when doing busi*ness in China and that they regret moving American jobs offshore. But they say it’s be*cause of global competition and the need for lower produc*tion costs to stay competitive.
  Justice is skeptical.
  The Pleasant Garden plant was the top one in the compa*ny for productivity and prof*itability, she said.
  “But they told us we can’t compete,” Justice said. “You can compete if all your executives are making big bonuses and you would drop those bonuses and keep your plant going.” On a recent sunny after*noon, the 52-year-old woman from Level Cross walks around the deserted Hooker grounds off the main road through the southern Guil*ford County town. Weeds brush against her feet in the former visitors parking area as she gestures to places in the mammoth brick building where she used to work.
  The factory grounds that used to reverberate with the activity of trucks delivering raw materials and taking away finished furnishings now is quiet except for an oc*casional car rolling by or bird chirping on a utility line.
  Justice knows – to the mo*ment – the key dates in her life at Hooker. She started on Aug. 9, 1993, figuring she land*ed the dream job from which she would retire. She was shocked on July 27, 2005, when Hooker executives came to the plant to tell them it would close in a matter of months.
  “They waited until about 3 o’clock, and they told us our plant was shutting down. Most of us, it was a shock,” she said.
  Justice, who was making $13.25 an hour when she lost her job, said she cried for days after the announcement. She has friends who filed for personal bankruptcy after the plant clos*ing and still haven’t recovered.
  Justice manages a conve*nience store and is studying at Randolph Community Col*lege to become a parole or pro*bation officer. She worries that the shut*down of the Pleasant Garden plant symbolizes the slow evaporation of the American middle class.
  “If the American people don’t soon wake up, this coun*try is going to be a Third World country,” she said.  

http://www.hpe.com/

Job losses to China here in my home county:

http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/...520&p_docnum=1

Lenoir intends to be a survivor. As Observer reporter Mike Drummond recounted last week, the foothills town of about 17,000 is bleeding furniture jobs. From 2000 to 2005, Caldwell County has lost 3,751 of them. That's in a state that has lost 22,000, or 68 percent, of its furniture jobs. Broyhill Furniture Industries, founded in Lenoir in 1905, employed 7,000 in the area in the 1990s. This month it announced another 700-worker layoff. By November its workforce in the area will have dwindled to 1,900.
This is the dark side of globalization, as furniture manufacturing moves to China, following cheap labor. In Lenoir, people in their 50s are losing furniture jobs paying $14 an hour, and taking store jobs at $6 or $7 an hour.Lenoir's furniture jobs are going, and they aren't coming back. What will the future hold?

This is what happened to me. I know how these people feel and I am so mad at not only these companies but our government who allows this to happen. Caldwell County need jobs, not new illegal aliens, but we keep getting the illegals, anyway.

http://www.charlotte.com/mld/charlot...s/14857923.htm
Lenoir suffers identity crisis
Layoffs leave furniture town with tough task of economic reinvention
MIKE DRUMMOND
mdrummond@charlotteobserver.com

JEFF WILLHELM
Kelly Hansen, 24, loves Lenoir and wants to stay.
Slideshow | Layoffs in Lenoir
LENOIR -- Nan McCall chuckles when asked if Lenoir's better days lie ahead. It's the gallows laugh of someone confronting an uncertain future.

"It will be a ghost town," says McCall, laid off from a furniture plant last summer.

Broyhill Furniture Industries recently said it will close its Pacemaker plant and lay off about 700 by August. Plant closings and cutbacks over the last five years have toppled the major pillar supporting Lenoir's economy. Where there were once more than a dozen big factories producing bedroom, dining room and living room sets, the Lenoir area now has one.

"The Furniture Capital of the South" is suffering from an identity crisis.

As it struggles to reinvent itself, sentiment remains uneasily divided. Will it be another Flint, the Michigan city left for dead in the '80s and '90s when General Motors downsized? Or will a downtown facelift and a plan to lure retirees trigger a renaissance?

McCall, 55, dropped out of high school to work in Lenoir furniture factories -- a Southern routine mimicked in Carolinas textile towns. Like scores of others, she's now attending GED classes. She says she's resigned to making $6.75 an hour as a cashier. As a furniture finisher, she used to make $14 an hour.Furniture Industry Job Losses 2000-2005

3,751

Furniture jobs lost in Caldwell county (40% loss)

22,000

Jobs lost in North Carolina (68% loss)

117,000

Jobs lost in the U.S. (17% loss)

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, N.C. Employment Security Commission.