MAIDEN, N.C. — Scot Wilson estimates he has spent most of his 56 years in an eight-block radius.
The youngest of eight kids, Wilson was 16 when he started working at the yarn mill across the street from his family’s home in Maiden, a quiet North Carolina town about 37 miles northwest of Charlotte that was once bustling thanks to its cotton mills.
Wilson would walk to and from high school, which let out at 2 p.m., then walk the few steps to the factory, where from 3 to 11 p.m., he helped assemble woven goods such as sheets, towels, T-shirts and police uniforms.
“When you’re from a big family, as you got old enough, you try to help your parents,” Wilson explains of his after-school job. He switched to 12-hour shifts after graduating high school.
Wilson spent nearly four decades at Delta Apparel before his bosses told him and his nearly 160 coworkers last spring that the Maiden facility would close and move its operations to Honduras. Wilson considers himself lucky to have found another job at a nearby furniture plant, where he started work before the Delta plant closed in July.
“It was heartbreaking,” Wilson says. “One of the reasons I got out when I did was because I was afraid at my age, I wouldn’t find nothing else. There ain’t no textiles around this way.”
Bringing back American jobs is a promise on which Donald Trump focused his presidential campaign. Speaking at a rally in Concord, N.C., less than a week before the election, Trump said his administration would “stop the jobs from leaving America.”
That’s a vow that particularly hit home in North Carolina, once a hotbed of textile manufacturing that has seen employment in the sector fall by more than 82 percent since the mid-1990s, according to Federal Reserve data.
But interviews with over a dozen Maiden residents, who like Wilson have witnessed the textile industry’s decline firsthand, show they remain skeptical of a comeback — regardless of their political leanings. And economists say for North Carolina, returning the industry to its former prominence is not feasible.
The main reasons are deep-rooted, and difficult to fix with incentives or policies. For one, labor remains cheaper in countries such as Honduras. Textile manufacturing has also become highly automated, so factories need fewer people to do the manual work now handled easily by machines.
“The same jobs are not coming back. We just do it differently today,” says UNC Charlotte economist John Connaughton. “The idea that somehow or another there are going to be loom producers or workers that are going to come back and get jobs here … that’s absolutely ridiculous.”
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In Maiden, a town of about 3,400, textile jobs have been on the decline for years. Carolina Mills closed its Maiden plant in 2002, and American & Efird followed suit the next year, both taking with them hundreds of well-paying positions. Delta also closed another one of its yarn plants in 2003, followed by the closure of Mohican Mills, too.
Bob Smyre, who has been Maiden’s mayor for over 36 years, says companies such as Carolina Mills were once mainstays of small communities, acting as civic pillars not unlike the American Legion.
“People used to say, ‘If I could just get a job at Carolina Mills. It’s sound, it’s going to be there forever.’ Of course it was good, and it paid good,” Smyre says.
In North Carolina, the industry’s decline has been a long, gradual slide that accelerated when the North American Free Trade Agreement — which Trump has called the worst trade deal “in the history of the world” — was signed in January 1994. Deals like NAFTA opened up new trade routes, and domestic manufacturers found themselves facing competition from cheap imports. Forced to lower their prices, U.S. companies looked to cut costs elsewhere, shuttering factories and laying off employees.
Since NAFTA was signed, textile manufacturing employment has plummeted by over 78 percent in the Hickory-Lenoir-Morganton metropolitan area, which includes Maiden, according to federal data.
Maiden sits in Catawba County, which voted heavily — 66.8 percent — for Trump in November.
Along with NAFTA and other trade deals he has deemed unfair, Trump has also blamed the U.S.’s 35 percent corporate tax rate for companies moving operations overseas. After Congress failed to vote on Trump’s plan to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, the White House indicated it will now pivot to tax reform, which proponents say will help entice American companies to do business at home.
At the Concord rally, Trump said North Carolina has been affected “more than most” by companies moving their operations out of the U.S.
“At the core of my contract is my plan to bring back your jobs that have been taken away,” Trump said.
