‘It knocked this city to its knees’: the closure of Pillowtex Mills in Kannapolis, North Carolina and the decline of the US textile industry

Abstract

This article explores the closure of Pillowtex Mills (formerly Cannon Mills) in Kannapolis in July 2003, a mass layoff that was the largest in the state's history, with almost 5000 workers losing their jobs. The Pillowtex closure was part of the broader demise of the textile sector, which lost 700,000 jobs between 1994 and 2002, the bulk of them in the southern states. It was also part of the wider decline of manufacturing industries in the United States. To date, most studies of deindustrialization have concentrated on the ‘Rust Belt’ states in the Northeast and Midwest, but this study of the Pillowtex closure reveals that deindustrialization is a truly national phenomenon. Although the Kannapolis workers lived in a ‘sunrise’ region associated with economic growth, and although their plight attracted a great deal of attention from both the media and politicians, the effects of the closure were still devastating. The decline of the textile industry is, moreover, hurting workers and communities across the South but scholars have not yet studied it extensively.