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CHAPTER 8: Pillowtex Says Goodnight
- University Press of Mississippi
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PILLOWTEX SAYS GOODNIGHT I was a green reporter, in my rookie year as a late-blooming journalist, when I stumbled onto a story that would haunt me for the next thirty years. My newspaper was the Sanford Herald in the textiles-and-tobacco county seat of Lee County, North Carolina. “Go to Harnett County and come back with at least two stories,” my editor told me. The assignment was no cinch. Neighboring Harnett County was a rural backwater, a tobacco road of farms and pine forests with a handful of tiny, nondescript towns dotting its landscape. But off I went, driving aimlessly up and down two-lane highways and country roads in my nine-year-old, two-door, yellow 1968 Ford Fairlane with the missing rear-view mirror, recapped tires, and passenger side door that wouldn’t open. As the midday sun bore down that June 1977, I saw a sign ahead telling me I was about to enter Erwin, “Denim Capital of the World.” What I found was a classic “mill town” of 3,800 souls that, like the old mining song Sixteen Tons says, were “owed to the company store” of Burlington Industries, at the time the world’s largest textile company with 88,000 workers at 149 plants around the country and beyond. Burlington ’s two plants in Erwin were a hulking presence, casting their giant shadows over streets with names like Denim Drive and Burlington Avenue , over the tiny downtown of a dozen or so shops, over the minds and spirits of the families of the 1,200 millworkers who made the 70 million yards of denim that came out of Erwin each year. Then I found a modest building close to downtown that proclaimed itself the local chapter of the “Carolina Brown Lung Association.” This, I would learn, was the one lonely spot in all of Erwin that wasn’t, and couldn’t be, controlled by Burlington Industries. “They should have told us,” Linnie Bass said, her bespectacled face drawn and serious, each breath short and precious, as she described the Chapter 8 142 143 Pillowtex Says Goodnight disease that she and other millworkers had incurred from decades of breathing in cotton dust at the Burlington plants. Rather than tell her the truth of her condition, the company doctor “would tell you to stop smoking , whether you smoked or not.” “We were just dollar bills to them, not humans,” added Eva Bradshaw, a fellow sufferer of the disease known as byssinosis, or brown lung. “I guess they’re waiting for us to die.”1 Their friend Talbert Faircloth sat nearby but didn’t say much. He was saving his breath. I learned, however, that the $2,500 he’d received in a company profit-sharing program for his twenty-seven years of service had been devoured by medical bills. They were among a handful of former workers who were fighting for their just due, for respect, for their lives, after giving the best of their days to the mill. Bass left Burlington after twenty years with a total disability and three-fifths of her breathing capacity destroyed. Bradshaw’s forty-one years at the mill brought her eight major operations and an income that consisted solely of a monthly $218 Social Security check. Burlington officials liked to boast publicly of the company’s medical screenings and studies, yet it failed workers like Bass, Bradshaw, and Faircloth, rewarding their decades of labor with years of resistance to pleas for compensation and justice in the fight against their disease. In 1988 Burlington sold its Erwin mills to a Canadian firm. Fifteen years later, the company was in bankruptcy and finally sold to financier Wilbur Ross. I lost track of Linnie Bass, Eva Bradshaw, Talbert Faircloth, and their struggles, but I never forgot them. Their stories are so much like the other millworker stories I’ve encountered over the years of my life, lots of little Davids throwing rocks at industrial Goliaths, giants that perhaps eventually fell but only after much-too-much suffering and much too late to help those they trampled along the way. I grew up with workers like them. My brother and I worked in textile plants as teenagers. My father worked in a mill that made textile machine parts. My mother was a seamstress in a garment factory. I got a stark reminder of those roots and experiences when I traveled through North Carolina doing research for this book in the summer of...