If high technology and high productivity aren't enough to ensure the good health of the industry, what will be? For two centuries, ever since textile manufacturing came over fromĮngland and became the first big business in America, the U.S. Year but were overshadowed by yet another increase in imports. Would be dramatically less," says Roger Chastain, chairman of Mount Vernon Mills. Have been among the leaders in calling for protection against foreign imports, but free trade offers some help to the U.S. Bargain-wage workers overseas can undercut Americans in low-tech work.
#Parkdale sparta nc update#
In fact, the machinery purchased to update American factories-the fastest looms and the most automatedĭye machines, for instance-comes mostly from overseas, from Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. Pushed prices down-without giving the U.S. Innovation are part of the problem as well as the promise, observes Neil Cahill, of the Institute of Textile Technology in Charlottesville, Va. Last year, for the first time in half a century, textile companies on average showed a slight loss. Yet for all these efforts, the industry is hurting badly. New companies replace old players with aging plants that have dropped out. Fascinating new products, such as leafy 3-D camouflage suits for hunters and woven composite planks and I-beamsįor structures, emerge from the labs. Automation has reached the point where some mills Textiles four times faster than machines did a decade ago and ten times faster than they did in the 1970s. Today's looms, some of them pictured on the pages that follow, weave The industry spent $2 billion annually on new technology over the past decade, and it shows. textile industry-5,000 makers of yarns and fabrics, some huge, some tiny, with total sales of $58 billion last year-is astonishingly innovativeĪnd productive.
0 kommentar(er)
