Textile and apparel industry sustains huge job losses

Tuesday, 18 December 2007

By Shelia Watson Contributing Writer While globalization and the drought have taken their toll on cotton production, that is only a piece of a larger, even drier and more brittle picture of economic distress in the state. The textile and apparel industry—intricately linked to the cotton industry as the “back-end” process that takes the sowing, growing and reaping of the cotton crop to market with finished goods—has lost about three-quarters of the jobs that it had when the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect in 1994. Earlier this year, the American Manufacturing Trade Action Coalition reported that U.S. textile and apparel job losses had passed 1 million. The group blamed the loss on the surge of imported goods that made their way into the country since the implementation of NAFTA. The agreement allows an easier system of trade between the United States, Mexico and Canada, with the majority of tariffs eliminated for products traded between the countries. Some trade groups, such as the American Manufacturing Trade Action Coalition, are opposed to NAFTA in principle and insist that the agreement hurts domestic business sectors, including the textile and apparel industry. Although things are beginning to look marginally brighter for the textile and apparel industry, with a 3.5% growth in gross domestic product in the state in 2006, as noted by the federal government’s Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Upstate continues to feel the loss of jobs. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that of the 122,511 textile jobs in South Carolina in 1994, only 32,200 remain today. North Carolina sustained similar losses with only 74,100 jobs remaining out of the 267,100 textile jobs there in 1994. The Trade Action Coalition contended that the Upstate, especially Spartanburg and Anderson, home to many of the state’s textile plants, might have even enjoyed an increase if not for NAFTA, noting that the nation’s demand for textiles has grown significantly since the trade agreement went into effect. Auggie Tantillo, the American Manufacturing Trade Action Coalition’s executive director, claimed that NAFTA was responsible for two-thirds of the jobs lost. “Analysis shows that the U.S. textile and apparel sector would have added more than 400,000 new jobs had this growth in the U.S. market been supplied by domestic production,” he said.