Her voice on the phone was like sweet tea and sandpaper, but the story that Joan Moton shared from her experience as a volunteer at the Unite textile union office carries more grit than sugar.
"We had a couple in here that the wife had got open heart surgery and she was on four or five different types of medicines, and her husband had been diagnosed with cancer and he was also on several medications. When we were trying to help her we asked her how she was making it with all of the costs, and she said she wasn't taking her medicine because he needed it more than her," Moton said.
Moton, 50, of Eden, N.C., worked for 20 years as an inspector of comforters for Pillowtex. She had been healthy all her life, but just before the company's plant closed she was diagnosed with cancer and underwent surgery to remove a kidney. Luckily, she said, she got treatment two months before she lost insurance coverage. But Moton worries about the medical and daily needs of other laid-off workers, needs which, based on the ubiquity of stories like the one she told, Moton said are not being met.
The problem facing laid-off workers is that Pillowtex was self-insured, so all employee health coverage ended the day the company closed.
Charles Page, senior vice president for community building with the United Way of Central Carolinas, emphasized that many employees have expensive medical needs no longer covered by insurance, pointing to the average employee age of 46.
Insurance company Blue Cross Blue Shield has designed a plan specifically for former workers. And since Pillowtex closed under the Trade Adjustment Act, which provides assistance to workers who have lost jobs due to shifts in production to or increased imports from foreign countries, workers are eligible to receive job retraining and up to 65 percent of their monthly health benefits paid.
But even with the subsidies, insurance remains one of the greatest challenges for former workers.
"They supposedly [were] to be helping us," said Gloria Craven, a former worker. "But with my husband and me combined the premium is $5,418 a month, and even with the government paying 65 percent I can't afford $1,900 a month on unemployment payments," she said. "My husband is a diabetic and I got asthma, so we got medications--that's the reason they wanna charge so much." Craven said she has dealt with every accessible level of government in pursuit of further benefits.
"Everyday we see people cutting their pills in half to try to extend their supply," Page said. "They're doing everything they can to extend their own resources, but they're going to end up with not a lot."
While relief workers such as Marty Morris of the United Way see health coverage as the workers' most critical need, they also highlight the secondary effects of closings on local economies where Pillowtex had a major presence.
"Within the first week we had a man come in who owned a little private auto repair service right down the road from the plant. All of his customers were from the plant and he hadn't had customers in weeks," Morris said. Even fast food has been impacted, she added.
"At the heart of this is $300 million of payroll no longer being infused into a community. It has ripple effects into the independent entrepreneurial businesses," said McCray Benson, senior vice president for community philanthropy at the Foundation for the Carolinas.
Still, those closest to the situation consistently say that the hardest thing for workers to adjust to is simply not having a job.
"With Pillowtex in particular, a lot of people are untrained and don't have a high level of education, so if you have someone who has been in the mill for 30 years it's hard to find a job that is compatible and pays the same," said Brian Nick, press secretary for Sen. Elizabeth Dole, R-N.C. "It presents the community with a very complex problem." Craven is one of those who worked for Pillowtex for 30 years. So is her husband, 61, who worked as a weaver with the company on and off for about 38 years.
"He's caught in between--not old enough to retire, but nobody's going to rehire him. I signed up to go back to school to get trained in respiratory therapy," something Craven said she gained interest in when she was trained by Unite to co-run a safety program at the plant.
As a doubler operator--"You take two layers and it makes it into one, and then it twists the material to make the borders of towels"--at a mill that manufactured Royal Velvet towels, Craven had experienced a layoff before.
"My husband and myself were both in the blanket mill when Fieldcrest sold it to Pillowtex, so we both got put out then. I transferred to Fieldale. Then my husband went to Burlington and they went into bankruptcy and laid him off there, so we got him into my plant," Craven said. "It's getting old."
With a brother who was laid off before her also in need of assistance, this closing hass hit close to home.
"This town was built by Fieldcrest--it's just a known thing, that when you get out of school, you go to work at the plant. When you've worked around these people for years it's like a second family breaking up," she said.
Immediately after the closings, Moton said she was "all out of place."
"After 20 years of having a place to go and a place to be and a paycheck at the end of the week and then suddenly having nothing, I was just devastated," she said. Moton now spends part of her time at the Unite office.
"I'm just helping people to find a way," she said. "There's a lot of hurt."
Craven has also found a different way to spend her time.
"I've been making a lot of quilts. It's something to occupy your mind and your time so you don't think about what's going on," she said. Pillowtex families have already made an informal waiting list to keep track of who gets the quilts.
"They said that when I'm done I should put the union stamp on 'em," she said.
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