"They Won't Know What We Had"

by Neil Caudle

When Wanda Harris finished high school and went to work sewing clothing for Tanner Companies in Rutherfordton, just a couple of miles up Highway 74 from Spindale, she never dreamed she'd do anything else. Twenty-five years later, in May of 2000, she and her coworkers in the Rutherfordton plant lost their jobs when Tanner sent its sewing to China.

"It was devastating," she says. "I was planning on working there until I retired, because you had security. At Tanner's, we never, ever dreamed that we would send the work offshore."

Even after she rose into management, as supervisor of a sewing group, the topic never came up. So the layoffs were a shock, and the shock hit women especially hard.

"I'd say fifty percent of the workers there were ladies," Harris says. "Some of them were single parents, and they can't just pick up and go looking for work. Some get child support, and some took jobs at Wal-Mart. And some just do without. I think it's been harder on the women because the men can pick up yard work or carpentry work."

Wanda Harris in a computer lab at Isothermal Community College. She is dressed in a Tanner suit she bought with her employee discount. Photo by Neil Caudle. Click to enlarge.

Workers who had been with the company fifteen years received a year's salary in severance and education allotments of up to three thousand dollars per year, Harris says. The company still honors her employee discount — 70 percent on new Tanner clothing. She has fared better than most, she says, because her husband had a job as a truck driver, and she was covered by his health insurance. And she has done what everyone advised her to do: go back to school and prepare for the new jobs in a new economy. Like thousands of others in Rutherford County, Harris checked into Isothermal Community College (ICC), which has become a kind of trauma center for mill-town survivors. The walking wounded stream in, and Isothermal revives their education, teaches them new skills. Many take those skills out of the county in search of work, because jobs at home are scarce.

In May, Harris finished a degree in information systems and computer networking. She found a job managing a Habitat for Humanity recycling center, which sells donated materials. Many of her customers are laid-off workers from the textile mills.

"One lady who came in the store the other day needed a door, because the front door on her house wouldn't lock any more," Harris says. "She had thirteen dollars in her checking account. I feel like we're providing a service, because we're helping the unemployed keep up the places they have."

For the first time in her life, Harris says, education has become a key to survival. "When my generation came out of high school in the late sixties, early seventies, education was not a big thing because we could get a job making twelve or fifteen dollars an hour," she says. "And that's big money around here. But those jobs are gone. And it's going to be hard for us to make sure that the children coming up get more education."

Harris does not regret the course of her life. "I made good money at Tanner and raised three boys, and I never regretted it," she says. "If you spend your life living in one town, working for one company, you know your neighbors. When we'd go to church, everybody was working in textiles, so we'd talk about Stonecutter, or we'd talk about Tanner. It was prestige to have one of those jobs. And we took pride in our work. We wouldn't send out anything unless every stripe matched and every seam was pressed. You just don't find that kind of quality in the stores anymore."

Her father worked at Stonecutter forty-five years repairing looms, making enough money to support his family. "My mom was a stay-at-home mom," Harris says, and her eyes flash with a hint of pride. She knows that not many women feel that they can afford to make that choice today. She tries to imagine the world as the next generation will find it, a world brimming with gadgets and cheap clothing made somewhere else. Will life be better when everyone changes jobs and homes with each new ripple of the global economy?

"People will have to work harder to keep their families together," she says. "And they will be more skeptical of trusting. That kind of life will look good in the young people's eyes because they won't have anything to compare it to. They won't know what we had."

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