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In early March, as the coronavirus pandemic forced America to contemplate a nationwide shutdown, Dan St. Louis started to get nervous. St. Louis runs a facility in Conover, North Carolina, called the Manufacturing Solutions Center, which prototypes and tests new fabrics and other materials; most of its funding comes from contracts with what remains of the American textile industry. With stay-at-home orders on the horizon, “our business just dried up immediately,” he says.

A week later, St. Louis’s cell phone began to ring incessantly: hospitals, nursing homes, and funeral homes from as far away as New York. Everyone wanted to know if he could find them masks and gowns, or tell them who could, or at least help them figure out whether the personal protective equipment (PPE) they could get was any good. “And that was just half my calls,” he says. The others were from makers of furniture, pants, and shirts, and dozens of other businesses with industrial facilities they wanted to put to use to help shore up the supply of whatever was needed. St. Louis breaks into rapid-fire gibberish trying to mimic the callers’ urgency, and then, chuckling, can’t seem to find the right words.

“I’m telling you … It was … You couldn’t.”

St. Louis has worked at the Manufacturing Solutions Center since it was founded, in 1990, as a division of Catawba Valley Community College. He keeps a list eight pages long of every kind of test the facility has ever run to evaluate specialty fabrics: filters used in motorcycle cooling systems and clothing that dispenses pain medication, hard casts for bone fractures and nontoxic treatment for raw silk, hybrid sock-tights featured on Oprah. But they’d never worked on PPE before March: “There wasn’t anybody calling us saying, ‘Hey, will you test this stuff?’” That’s because most PPE was made overseas.

North Carolina’s Manufacturing Solutions Center prototypes and tests new fabrics and other materials, working with renewed urgency because of the pandemic.

CHRIS EDWARDS

St. Louis’s sudden education began just as governments across the world started treating the looming shortage of masks and face shields as a matter of national security. Germany banned PPE exports on March 4. Malaysia, India, and dozens of others soon took similar measures. Diplomacy eased some of this early jockeying over the existing supply—Taiwan pledged to donate 10 million masks overseas, President Donald Trump grudgingly allowed 3M to sell N95s to Canada, the EU convinced Germany to share its PPE with the rest of the bloc and then prohibited exports outside it—but by the end of April, the World Trade Organization was reporting that more than 80 countries around the world had taken steps to limit exports of PPE during the pandemic.

It was a scenario St. Louis had often thought about before: the US, abruptly forced to go it alone, discovering how little the country makes of the stuff it consumes. Usually, he imagined a war with China: “You can’t call and say ‘Our guys are cold—we need stuff.’” But the pandemic made clear that the pinch could come in a variety of forms.

In 1990, he recalled, the US textile industry produced 60% of the “cut & sew” apparel made worldwide—that is, clothing with stitches on the seams, as opposed to knitted wool sweaters or rain gear whose pieces are welded together with heat. Today that figure is 3%. When federal and state agencies began to publish numbers about how much PPE they’d need to outlast the accelerating outbreak, St. Louis was flabbergasted. “We need a billion gowns! Good God,” he says. “We need a billion? A billion? I can’t even fathom that.”

The sudden need for a range of lifesaving fabrics threw the handful of facilities like St. Louis’s into overdrive. In the middle of March, they began ferrying samples, performance specs, and recommended adjustments back and forth to fabric mills trying to convert their operations overnight to making essential goods. At the end of three months, St. Louis says, the Manufacturing Solutions Center had helped 28 companies begin churning out fabric suitable for hospital gowns.

Masks and respirators are a different question. Existing worldwide supplies of the melt-blown polypropylene used in the most coveted PPE item in hospitals—the N95 respirators capable of filtering out the virus—are spoken for through at least the first few months of 2021. In March, a senior official at the US Department of Health and Human Services estimated that American health-care workers alone would go through 3.5 billion N95 masks fighting the coronavirus.

Surgical masks are not as protective as N95s, but they do shield the wearer from droplets and fluids better than the now ubiquitous cloth masks—3% to 25% better, depending on the study. To sustain any meaningful reopening of the economy, surgical masks will likely have to be made by the tens or even hundreds of billions. Outfits like the Manufacturing Solutions Center are also uniquely qualified to develop a new generation of higher-performance cloth masks, or ones that use small filter inserts to stretch scarce materials further. One model created at the facility is a knit mask woven through with copper, which is being used in medical facilities and by the US military. Thanks to its tight fit, it “doesn’t fog my glasses,” as one of St. Louis’s colleagues says, but they have no way to evaluate it more definitively than that.

CHRIS EDWARDS

In July, St. Louis was still scrambling to raise $500,000 to buy machinery that would allow him to test the fabric used in masks. Meanwhile, he refers inquiries about mask testing to a company in Nevada—the lone private laboratory in the US certified by the CDC to perform such tests.

Meanwhile, 40 miles south of Conover, in the town of Belmont, the Textile Technology Center at Gaston College specializes in what the industry refers to as “yarn.” Give Dan Rhodes a small sample of a novel polymer, and he’ll figure out how to extrude it into a filament, and how to fine-tune the process to see whether the material can be made to work in high-speed manufacturing. Rhodes and his colleagues are working with a manufacturer of coronavirus test kits to make the fiber wicks that siphon saliva samples into a blend of testing reagents. Another client is an Ohio-based manufacturer of cotton swabs that is replacing the cotton with a synthetic equivalent in order to make nasal testing swabs uncontaminated by the plant fiber’s DNA.

Vital work. And yet in each case, few American businesses could step up to fill a similar niche. Rhodes told me that most surviving textile companies have long since disbanded the proprietary sampling labs they used to house on site. Many of the senior staff at both centers learned their trade at companies that were picked apart and reconstituted overseas after hostile takeovers by investors like Wilbur Ross, the current secretary of commerce, who made part of his fortune outsourcing textile jobs to Asia in the early 2000s.

That means much of the brain trust for the American textile industry—the Manufacturing Solutions Center’s website advertises “300 years of textile experience”—got its training in private-sector jobs that no longer exist in the United States. Rhodes, who is 72, plans to retire at the end of August and jokes that “half the people here collect a Social Security check.” St. Louis retired in July; every plant where he ever worked closed long ago.

Rhodes recalls watching from afar as the town of Fort Payne, Alabama, lost its status as “sock capital of the world.” “All it takes is one financier”—he stretches the word across four venomous syllables—“on Wall Street to call somebody in China and say, ‘Send me a million dozen of those black socks with the gold thread in the toe.’ He doesn’t know how to make any socks, but he can destroy all that expertise.”

Why did the sock makers leave Fort Payne? To Jon Clark, who spent 30 years crisscrossing the country from his home in Houston to buy scrap equipment from shuttered factories, the answer is obvious: there’s money to be made shifting operations from what he calls “the 30-, 40-, 50-dollar-an-hour zone in the US” to the “three-, four-, five-dollar zone” overseas. The problem, in Clark’s view, is that the incentives driving the economy no longer distinguish between profitability and greed. “It used to be that plants closed because they weren’t profitable,” he says. “Now they close because they’re not profitable enough.”

Clark, who is 72, began his career in 1965 as an engineer in a Texas fertilizer plant where chemically induced asthma was a daily hazard. He remembers watching birds expire in midair as they flew from one side of the plant to the other. Environmental laws transformed huge swaths of American manufacturing, but they also gave US corporations a strong incentive to relocate factories to places where they could pollute at will.

Over the same period, seismic improvements in shipping and technology made it possible for corporations to rely on networks of suppliers that stretch across the planet. Modern supply chains are fluid and elaborate, ever shifting to account for minute changes in the price of screws, thread, or copper wire. As a result, manufacturers have continued to bring cheaper goods to American consumers even as the components required to make them come from farther and farther away.

“Can you imagine a plant that does nothing but break a million eggs a month? That’s 500 tons of broken shells a year!”

Jon Clark, publisher of Plant Closing News

Clark began buying and selling equipment full time in the 1980s, just as these transformations were accelerating the exodus of heavy manufacturing from the US to cheaper labor markets all over the world—China, Mexico, Vietnam. In 2003, he began publishing a biweekly newsletter called Plant Closing News (PCN) as a service for the scrap industry, a way to help auctioneers and equipment brokers chase leads on bargain wire stranders and double-arm mixers across the country. Over the years, his encyclopedic knowledge of the decline—or, more charitably, the evolution—of American industry has crystallized into a kind of lament about the shifting character of the US economy.

Each PCN listing includes the type of facility and its expected closing date, an address, a phone number, and the name of a contact person for anyone looking to move, buy, or scrap the equipment inside, along with a sentence or two on the number of displaced workers and the reasons behind a plant’s shuttering. Compiling the entries is simple, if grueling, work that usually involves extracting the necessary particulars over the phone from employees likely to be losing their jobs. By the time Clark sent out the last issue in December 2019, after a detached retina left him temporarily blind in one eye, he had chronicled the demise of 16,000 factories, plants, and mills in 17 years.

When Clark and I first spoke, he began reading his newsletter aloud to me over the phone in a rich Texas baritone, interspersed with his own idiosyncratic commentary. “Can you imagine a plant that does nothing but break a million eggs a month?” he asked. “That’s 500 tons of broken shells a year!”

Jon Clark with his wife, Donna

COURTESY PHOTO

Clark rattled off all the factory closures he’d compiled for a stretch of July 2019: an aircraft-lock assembly plant, a scrap-metal shredding facility, a conveyor manufacturer, three plastic-bottle plants, a foundry, a glass plant, a South Carolina plant that manufactured textile machinery, a pharmaceutical plant in Wyoming (“The only one,” he interjected), a Florida plant that bent tubes into automotive parts, a paint-manufacturing plant in Missouri, a corrugated-cardboard-box plant in New York, and on and on and on. “Those are the ones that I know of,” Clark added, when he finally reached the end of the list.

The decision to close a plant often heralds a chaotic time on the ground, as a dwindling team on site shoulders the responsibility of continuing to run a facility slated for closure. There’s still inventory to track, maintenance to be done, and product to be pushed out, along with all the paperwork that goes into settling the books before closing a place down. Often, the workers themselves are the last ones to be told.

For the first five years of PCN, Clark’s daughter Kristen, then at home with her oldest child, was his main “caller.” She took the leads he gleaned from trade publications and industry chatter, contacted the plants, and coaxed the remaining staff into providing the information needed for Rolodex-like entries designed to help contractors gin up business in demolition, secondhand equipment, and environmental remediation. “We got hung up on a lot,” Kristen remembers. But there were also moments of pathos. “We got an opportunity to cry with them, and pray with them, and a lot of them got very angry,” Jon says.

PCN’s run overlapped with a historic decline in manufacturing employment in the United States. From 2000 to 2016, the US shed nearly 5 million manufacturing jobs, or more than a quarter of the total, and one out of every five manufacturing establishments in the country shut its doors. Clark charted this decline in his newsletter, watching as globalization tugged at one thread after another in the tapestry of American industry. In the early 2000s, a wave of sock manufacturers closed, followed by food-processing plants, plastics plants, automotive plants, and lightbulb factories.

CHRIS EDWARDS

In 2013, Walmart rolled out a “Made in the USA” campaign, vowing to shore up domestic manufacturing by spending $50 billion over 10 years on US-made goods. But the company was forced to scale back its ambitions after the watchdog group Truth in Advertising found hundreds of products at Walmart stores falsely labeled as made in the USA. As Clark put it, “We still have 330 million people in this country, most of whom wear socks, but Walmart couldn’t find anybody who made socks in America.”

Five years ago, Donald Trump campaigned on the argument that manufacturers who offshored American jobs were forsaking patriotism for profit. Fused with racist grievance and conspiracy theory, that message helped propel him to the Republican nomination and then the presidency. In the 2016 election, Trump’s attacks on corporations that “moved [our] jobs to Mexico” were a core element of his pitch to the very same voters—white, male Midwesterners with a high school education—who formed a prominent cohort in America’s shrinking manufacturing workforce.

At the time, the prevailing wisdom among economists held that Trump was wrong. Certainly, previous declines in American manufacturing, such as the waves of textile and steel layoffs in the 1980s, could be linked more or less directly to gains in developing countries. Hundreds of new garment factories opened in China, Bangladesh, and Indonesia. Brazil and South Korea aggressively expanded steel production. But while the decline in the 2000s appeared to have a similar explanation—now China’s and South Korea’s economies were expanding by leaps and bounds, and American stores were filling with Korean TVs and Chinese toys and electronics—many economists and commentators looked at the data on manufacturing’s share of GDP and concluded that imports couldn’t be the major culprit behind so many lost jobs.

A typical example: Michael Hicks, an economist at Ball State University, coauthored a widely cited report arguing that “import substitution”—Americans’ choices to buy cheaper foreign-made products instead of more expensive goods made domestically—accounted for only about 750,000 lost jobs, or roughly one-seventh of the total. What took away the rest? Layoffs of redundant workers once protected by unions; robots and automation; and reliance on more efficient maintenance and service contractors in place of part of the former labor force, he argued. After all, even as the number of manufacturing jobs shrank dramatically, the dollar value of US manufactured goods continued to grow. “I call it productivity,” Hicks told me.

For years, Susan Houseman, a labor economist at the Upjohn Institute for Employment in Kalamazoo, Michigan, watched a parade of pundits explain away those 4 million lost jobs in similar terms. Houseman didn’t buy it. Beginning in 2007, she published a series of papers arguing that the basic tools the federal government uses to generate manufacturing, import, and export statistics were misleading and frequently misinterpreted.

The Wilde Yarn Mill in Manayunk, Pennsylvania, closed in 2012. When it opened in the 1880s there were over 800 textile operations in the area. It had been the oldest continually operating yarn mill in the country.

MATTHEW CHRISTOPHER

If a television manufacturer that sells $1,000 TVs relocates production overseas, and Americans start buying $500 imported TVs instead, the amount of economic activity “displaced” by offshoring shows up as $500, not $1,000. But the American town that hosted the old factory lost $1,000 worth of work. Even if the TV is still made in the US, but complex components start being sourced abroad, productivity statistics don’t account for labor done by foreign suppliers. If a TV assembled in Ohio takes nine hours of Vietnamese labor and one hour of Toledo labor, as opposed to all 10 hours coming from Toledo, federal statistics will show that American manufacturers are suddenly able to produce 10 times as many TVs with the same amount of labor. “Productivity” jumps. It appears as though technology improved, when what really happened is that jobs were shipped abroad.

Furthermore, Houseman adds, for several decades, the speed and power of the chips and semiconductors churned out by one small slice of American manufacturers advanced so rapidly that increases in “output” from that sector alone accounted for the vast majority of productivity gains among US manufacturers. Leave computers out of it, and all of a sudden US manufacturing appeared to be in very bad shape.

“Research that has looked at the automation story, the robot story—there’s really no evidence that that could have precipitated such a large decline in manufacturing employment,” Houseman says. “Trump resonated to some people because what he was saying seemed true to them, and to a very large degree, he was right.”

After the pandemic hit, one ingredient in China’s remarkable recovery was its ability to turn the rudder of its enormous industrial engine to the needs of the moment. By one estimate, Chinese production of N95s and other surgical masks grew 30-fold in less than three months, reaching nearly half a billion a day. By contrast, 3M, the largest domestic US manufacturer of N95s, has received enough government funding to nearly triple its output and currently produces just over 1.5 million a day.

Willy Shih, a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School, says part of this chasm stems from the loss of the “industrial commons”—the combination of expertise, infrastructure, and networks of mutually dependent businesses that help foster efficiency and innovation. Over time, Shih argues, outsourcing has cannibalized not only the assembly line jobs we associate with the factory floor, but the whole chain of intellectual effort that makes those jobs possible.

This arrangement has given American corporations unparalleled freedom to swap contractors, minimize tax burdens, and make things using inventory someone else pays to insure and maintain. But all that flexibility, meant to guard against financial risks to shareholders, turns out to be flexibility of the wrong kind for 2020. Any manufacturer that built in wiggle room to better weather a pandemic would have had “Wall Street analysts all over their case,” Shih says, saying: “Look at how inefficiently you’re using your capital.”

Clark, the founder of Plant Closing News, blames this pathological pursuit of efficiency in large part on Jack Welch, the iconic late CEO of General Electric. When I visited Clark in Houston in February, he summarized Welch’s gospel as follows: If you have 10 employees, no matter how well they’re doing as a group, rank them 1 to 10, and get rid of number 10. (The company abandoned this “rank and yank” policy a few years after Welch stepped down in 2001.) “And if you have 60 manufacturing plants, and the smallest one is in North Carolina, and they’re pretty good but they’re always near the bottom of that list … when I call, the plant manager starts crying: ‘I been here for 40 years. This is my family.’ Why? Because you have 59 other plants that can make this stuff and ‘we don’t need you’?” Clark winced.

He turned his attention to the stack of copies of PCN on the table and scanned through an issue from June 2019. A vehicle seating manufacturer was laying off 28 employees near Kalamazoo and shifting production to Mexico and Kentucky; a plastic-molding plant in Illinois was shutting down and consolidating its operations in Mexico and China; a medical-device manufacturer in Southern California was moving its plant to Malaysia. “This is not uncommon—this is every one of these,” Clark said. “If you’re making money and your people are doing a decent job, why would you move it somewhere cheaper so you can hire foreigners and put your own people on welfare? That’s never made any sense to me.”

One hallmark of our era in capitalism is the rise of companies that are both everywhere and nowhere at once. Today, multinational corporations—registered in Delaware, paying taxes in Ireland, sourcing materials on five continents—drive the majority of worldwide trade. “Why wouldn’t you have the business community up in arms about [offshoring] undermining their competitiveness in the United States?” Susan Houseman asked me. “Because it may not be undermining their competitiveness.”

But it may be undermining the US national interest. Because the American manufacturing sector is more consolidated and narrower in scope than it once was, it’s also less diverse, less resilient, and less able to respond to a crisis.

Bancroft Mills, a fabric mill in Wilmington, Delaware, had been vacant since the early 2000s and was largely destroyed by a fire in the autumn of 2016.

MATTHEW CHRISTOPHER

According to Behnam Pourdeyhimi, the director of the Nonwovens Institute at North Carolina State University, the current wait for a machine that can produce the melt-blown polypropylene used in N95 respirators is about 14 months. The technology for the machines was developed in the United States, but these days, Pourdeyhimi says, aside from a small manufacturer in Florida and a sprinkling of others in Europe and China, German companies enjoy a near monopoly, simply because their machines are so good. The machines used to “convert” melt-blown into wearable PPE are somewhat easier to come by, he says, but 90% of them—both for N95s and for pleated surgical masks—are made in China.

However, recovering the ability to make machines that make PPE is not impossible, Pourdeyhimi says. He estimates the necessary investment to be in the tens of millions of dollars. It should be doable in months.

During World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s War Production Board famously redirected huge swaths of the American economy to make things the military needed. Factories contributing to the war effort jumped to the front of the line for scarce raw materials. “The entire capacity of the laundry industry will be devoted to war,” the board’s chairman announced in 1942: brass and steel would be conserved by putting an end to washing-machine production. Nylon was reserved for parachutes. Typewriter factories were converted to produce rifle barrels, while those that couldn’t went on making typewriters exclusively for the government. Technology was put to work where it was most needed.

All through the spring of 2020, there were stories of vegetables being plowed under and manure ponds filled with fresh milk because the US lacked the proper packaging and processing infrastructure to convert cafeteria and wholesale food into products that could be sold in grocery stores—or even, perhaps, given away.

Even if individual firms are flexible today in ways they weren’t in the past—a consequence of the transformations Shih describes—the system as a whole cannot effectively pivot as it did during the last crisis of this scale. Though Trump did not create the decades-long decline in American manufacturing, that the president is—to say the least—no FDR is a not insignificant factor in America’s anemic response. Whatever credit Trump deserves for articulating the role of trade in weakening American manufacturing, he has managed to squander a generational opportunity to throw the weight of the federal government behind securing its vitality.

In recent months, the Trump administration has waved away the need for legislation aimed at “re-shoring,” arguing that a presidential charm offensive will be enough to awaken CEOs’ sense of patriotism. Clark doesn’t see it that way. “It’s all about where these companies make the most money,” he says. “‘If you want us to manufacture in the US, you’re gonna pay for it.’”

This year is the second time Clark has decided to retire. The first time, he lasted six months. He still bids on equipment every month or two. Why? “For my own entertainment. Because I’m crazy …” He pauses. “Because a peanut plant closed in Georgia and they have two 30,000-gallon propane tanks and I’ve got a buyer that wants them. So why not?”

#BIZMARK

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stocksnewsfeed · 5 years ago

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The $400 billion outdoor industry sounds alarm on Trump’s trade war tariffs

Columbia sportswear unveils a new shoe collection with Zedd, a DJ and music producer.

Source: Columbia Sportswear Co.

Representatives from VF Corporation, Columbia Sportswear, Nester Hosiery, and NEMO Equipment met with lawmakers on Capitol Hill this week, letting them know just how hard the U.S.-China trade war is hitting their bottom-line.

“We want our message to get across that this is effecting American businesses, American jobs, American innovation and it’s just delaying all of that,” said Katie Kumerow, sustainability manager for Nester Hosiery, which manufactures specialty socks.

From September 2018 to July 2019, outdoor recreation businesses have paid $1.8 billion more in tariffs compared to the year ago period, according to new data released Thursday by the Outdoor Industry Association. This tariff increase is nearly triple what outdoor industry companies paid last year, according to the trade group’s latest data.

“Our growth is being hampered right now because we are not able to expand our workforce,” says Brent Merriam, Nemo Equipment Chief Operating Officer, who joined fellow association members on Capitol Hill Thursday.

NEMO Equipment, a 30-person New Hampshire-based manufacturer of sleeping bags and tents, has paid $175,000 in tariffs so far. While that might not seem like much, Merriam says it means a lot to his business, and has resulted in putting three jobs on hold.

NEMO Equipment has also had to dedicate time and resources to finding new supply chain partners. Merriam traveled to the Philippines last fall as part of an effort to relocate a line of camp chairs from a supplier in China.

“The resources that we normally would’ve applied to innovating new products have been diverted to making the same product we already make somewhere else,” Merriam said.

Nester Hosiery, which is based in Mount Airy, North Carolina, has faced its own set of challenges when it comes to sock production. Its largest supplier was based in China, but luckily had facilities based in Europe and was able to move operations there to avoid the coming wave of tariffs. The process took nearly six months, and even now, the lead time for ordering materials is three to four weeks longer than before.

“We’ve also already undergone a year and a half of absolute, utter uncertainty,” said Kumerow, following meetings with members of Congress. “Even though we are just being impacted for the most part right now, starting in September, we’ve been scrambling for a year anticipating what might happen.”

Columbia Sportswear provided lawmakers with a mockup of a “tariff price tag” that shows the impact of President Donald Trump’s trade war in a photo taken Sept. 12, 2019.

Mary Catherine Wellons | CNBC

The outdoor recreation economy accounts for 2.2% of the U.S. GDP, or $412 billion, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The trade group estimates that the industry supports 7.6 million American jobs and accounts for $887 billion in consumer spending, factoring in everything from apparel and footwear to airfare and ski lift tickets.

What has been a robust slice of the economy faces job losses and price increases for consumers if the trade war drags on. Emily Vedaa, Columbia Sportswear’s global customs and trade manager, said she hoped to provide lawmakers with tangible examples of the trade war impact.

One of those examples: “tariff price tags.” Columbia mocked up price tags that show the sticker price of a Columbia fleece jacket — along with the regular duty tariff of 32% and additional punitive duty of 25% imposed in recent months by Trump. What starts out as a $100 jacket jumps up to $157. Columbia Sportswear wants the price tags to hammer home how the tariffs are impacting consumers.

“We haven’t raised our prices yet, but we are in the process of considering what and when and how much we can actually do that,” said Vedaa. Columbia’s products were hit hardest by the 15% tariff increase on about $111 billion in Chinese goods that went into effect on Sept. 1, and Vedaa said the company had to scramble to import as much product as possible ahead of that deadline. While Columbia has yet to raise prices on consumers, it’s still absorbing the cost of the tariffs in the meantime.

The outdoor retail group’s members met with lawmakers from nearly a dozen states. The group started the day meeting Rep. Greg Gianforte, R-Mont., where the outdoor recreation economy generates 71,000 jobs and $7.1 billion in consumer spending according to the group.

“No one wins with a trade war,” Gianforte, said in a statement to CNBC. “I’ve urged trade negotiators to quickly resolve talks and announce new trade deals that work for Montana.”

The need for certainty has never been greater as companies who have tried to absorb the cost of tariffs until now, but must contemplate inevitable price increases that will ultimately hit the American consumer.

“There’s so much value in having our members come to Washington,” said Patricia Rojas-Ungar, a lobbyist for the group. “It is that pressure from Americans coming to talk to their elected officials and making calls to the White House that is causing the President to rethink this policy because the policy is not working, and it’s the American people that are being harmed.”

The post The $400 billion outdoor industry sounds alarm on Trump’s trade war tariffs appeared on Stocks News Feed.

source https://stocksnewsfeed.com/cnbc/the-400-billion-outdoor-industry-sounds-alarm-on-trumps-trade-war-tariffs/

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filtration-products · 6 years ago

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OUTLOOK™ Plus Latin America 2019 Announces Final Program:

OUTLOOK Plus Latin America 2019 Announces Final Program:

Nonwoven, Personal Care, Hygiene, Filtration & Medical Industry Expert Speakers Convene São Paulo, Brazil, May 7-9

Cary, North Carolina, USA and Brussels, Belgium – April 8, 2019 – The two global nonwoven trade associations, EDANA and INDA, announce the program of speakers and topics for OUTLOOK Plus Latin America to be held in São Paulo, 7-9 May 2019.

The third edition of this unique three-day networking conference and exhibition will examine the latest regional developments in the nonwoven personal care and absorbent hygiene sectors. The third day will focus on nonwoven filtration media and nonwoven medical products.

The first two days of the conference and tabletop display exhibition offer an overview of the Latin American hygiene nonwoven markets, and feature presentations on private/retail brand labels, product design & challenges, sustainability and new materials & technologies.

Keynote presenter, Welber Barral, Ph.D., Chairman of the Brazil Industries Coalition and former Brazilian Secretary of Foreign Trade, opens the conference with a presentation on the country’s economy, reviewing the risks and the opportunities and economic and political prospects.

Day 2 will kick off with a second keynote speech on trends and opportunities in the disposable hygiene market by Rafael Pellegrini, Research Analyst at Euromonitor International.

The program includes presentations from the following global and regional companies:

May 7-8, nonwoven hygiene and personal care products

Colquimica (Portugal) CVS (Brazil) EDANA (Belgium) Evonik (Germany) ExxonMobil Química (Brazil) F.biz (Brazil) Fitesa (Germany) GPA – EXTRA (Brazil) Kimberly-Clark (Brazil) Nielsen (Brazil) Ontex (Brazil) Organica (Brazil) Richer Investment & Diaper Testing International (Mexico & USA) Suzano (Brazil) SynTouch Inc. (USA) Tredegar (Brazil) VELCRO (United Kingdom)

May 9, medical & filtration

Ahlstrom-Munksjo (Brazil) Braskem (Brazil) Centexbel (Belgium) Fibertex Nonwovens A/S (Denmark) Hollingsworth & Vose (USA) Lydall Performance Materials (USA)

“This third edition of the OUTLOOK Plus Latin America conference highlights the opportunities and potential for growth across the Latin American nonwovens industry, particularly for the personal care industries. In organizing this conference, we are keen to offer a program that addresses both retail and marketing aspects as well as product design considerations that are key to understand the Latin American nonwovens markets. The program also features important presentations on medical application and – for the very first time – filtration media, highlighting the opportunities into the Latin American nonwovens industry,” said Marines Lagemaat, Technical Director of EDANA.

“INDA is pleased to once again co-organize a major nonwovens conference in South America focused on nonwoven markets in South America. For this edition, we have had outstanding support from ABINT, the Brazilian nonwovens organization, in developing a program consisting largely of Brazilian presenters on the markets there. This will be a must-attend event for all elements of the nonwovens supply chain in South America, from raw material supplier to roll goods producer to the converters and brand owners,” said Dave Rousse, INDA President.

Besides high-level presentations, the program is designed to offer qualitative networking opportunities to participants including two receptions in the tabletop area.

Simultaneous translation is offered into Portuguese and Spanish during the conference.

For full program information including presentation highlights, conference and hotel registrations, visit: http://bit.ly/2I7LfK7

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About EDANA

EDANA serves more than 250 companies across 36 countries in the nonwovens and related industries, helping its members to design their future. The Association’s mission is to create the foundation for sustainable growth of the nonwovens and related industries through active promotion, education and dialogue. Information about upcoming events can be found at www.edana.org

About INDA

INDA, the Association of the Nonwoven Fabrics Industry, serves hundreds of member companies in the nonwovens/engineered fabrics industry in global commerce. Since 1968, INDA events have helped members connect, learn, innovate, and develop their businesses. INDA educational courses, market data, test methods, consultancy, and issue advocacy help members succeed by providing them the information they need to better plan and execute their business strategies. For more information, visit inda.org or call 919-459-3700.

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For further information, please contact:

Joan Izzo, Marketing Director INDA Telephone: +1 919 459 3717 Email: [email protected]

Sean Kerrigan, Communications and Media Relations Director

EDANA

Telephone: +32 2 734 93 16

E-mail: [email protected]

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bountyofbeads · 6 years ago

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China’s Detention Camps for Muslims Turn to Forced Labor https://nyti.ms/2QUZ3vh

China’s Detention Camps for Muslims Turn to Forced Labor

Chinese state television showed Muslims attending classes on how to be law-abiding citizens. Evidence is emerging that detainees are also being forced to take jobs in new factories.

By Chris Buckley and Austin Ramzy | Dec. 16, 2018 | New York Times | Posted December 16, 2018 |

KASHGAR, China — Muslim inmates from internment camps in far western China hunched over sewing machines, in row after row. They were among hundreds of thousands who had been detained and spent month after month renouncing their religious convictions. Now the government was showing them on television as models of repentance, earning good pay — and political salvation — as factory workers.

China’s ruling Communist Party has said in a surge of upbeat propaganda that a sprawling network of camps in the Xinjiang region is providing job training and putting detainees on production lines for their own good, offering an escape from poverty, backwardness and the temptations of radical Islam.

But mounting evidence suggests a system of forced labor is emerging from the camps, a development likely to intensify international condemnation of China’s drastic efforts to control and indoctrinate a Muslim ethnic minority population of more than 12 million in Xinjiang.

Accounts from the region, satellite images and previously unreported official documents indicate that growing numbers of detainees are being sent to new factories, built inside or near the camps, where inmates have little choice but to accept jobs and follow orders.

“These people who are detained provide free or low-cost forced labor for these factories,” said Mehmet Volkan Kasikci, a researcher in Turkey who has collected accounts of inmates in the factories by interviewing relatives who have left China. “Stories continue to come to me,” he said.

China has defied an international outcry against the sweeping internment program in Xinjiang, which holds Muslims and forces them to renounce religious piety and pledge loyalty to the party. The emerging labor program underlines the government’s determination to continue operating the camps despite calls from United Nations human rights officials, the United States and other governments to close them.

The program aims to transform scattered Uighurs, Kazakhs and other ethnic minorities — many of them farmers, shopkeepers and tradespeople — into a disciplined, Chinese-speaking industrial work force, loyal to the Communist Party and factory bosses, according to official plans published online.

These documents describe the camps as vocational training centers and do not specify whether inmates are required to accept assignments to factories or other jobs. But pervasive restrictions on the movement and employment of Muslim minorities in Xinjiang, as well as a government effort to persuade businesses to open factories around the camps, suggest that they have little choice.

Independent accounts from inmates who have worked in the factories are rare. The police block attempts to get near the camps and closely monitor foreign journalists who travel to Xinjiang, making it all but impossible to conduct interviews in the region. And most Uighurs who have fled Xinjiang did so before the factory program grew in recent months.

But Serikzhan Bilash, a founder of Atajurt Kazakh Human Rights, an organization in Kazakhstan that helps ethnic Kazakhs who have left neighboring Xinjiang, said he had interviewed relatives of 10 inmates in recent months who had told their families that they were made to work in factories after undergoing indoctrination in the camps.

They mostly made clothes, and they called their employers “black factories,” because of the low wages and tough conditions, he said.

Mr. Kasikci also described several cases based on interviews with family members: Sofiya Tolybaiqyzy, who was sent from a camp to work in a carpet factory. Abil Amantai, 37, who was put in a camp a year ago and told relatives he was working in a textile factory for $95 a month. Nural Razila, 25, who had studied oil drilling but after a year in a camp was sent to a new textile factory nearby.

“It’s not as though they have a choice of whether they get to work in a factory, or what factory they are assigned to,” said Darren Byler, a lecturer at the University of Washington who studies Xinjiang and visited the region in April.

He said it was safe to conclude that hundreds of thousands of detainees could be compelled to work in factories if the program were put in place at all of the region’s internment camps.

The Xinjiang government did not respond to faxed questions about the factories, nor did the State Council Information Office, the central government agency that answers reporters’ questions.

The documents detail plans for inmates, even those formally released from the camps, to take jobs at factories that work closely with the camps to continue to monitor and control them. The socks, suits, skirts and other goods made by these laborers would be sold in Chinese stores and could trickle into overseas markets.

Kashgar, an ancient, predominantly Uighur area of southern Xinjiang that is a focus of the program, reported that in 2018 alone it aimed to send 100,000 inmates who had been through the “vocational training centers” to work in factories, according to a plan issued in August.

That figure may be an ambitious political goal rather than a realistic target. But it suggests how many Uighurs and other Muslim ethnic minorities may be held in the camps and sent to factories. Scholars have estimated that as many as one million people have been detained. The Chinese government has not issued or confirmed any figures.

“I don’t see China yielding an inch on Xinjiang,” said John Kamm, the founder of the Dui Hua Foundation, a San Francisco-based group that lobbies China on human rights issues. “Now it seems we have entrepreneurs coming in and taking advantage of the situation.”

The evolution of the Xinjiang camps echoes China’s “re-education through labor” system, where citizens once were sent without trial to toil for years. China abolished “re-education through labor” five years ago, but Xinjiang appears to be creating a new version.

Retailers in the United States and other countries should guard against buying goods made by workers from the Xinjiang camps, which could violate laws banning imports produced by prison or forced labor, Mr. Kamm said.

While the bulk of clothes and other textile goods manufactured in Xinjiang ends up in domestic and Central Asian markets, some makes its way to the United States and Europe.

Badger Sportswear, a company based in North Carolina, last month received a container of polyester knitted T-shirts from Hetian Taida, a company in Xinjiang that was shown on a prime-time state television broadcast promoting the camps.

The program showed workers at a Hetian Taida plant, including a woman who was described as a former camp inmate. But the small factory did not appear to be on a camp site, and it is unclear whether it made the T-shirts sent to North Carolina.

Ginny Gasswint, a Badger Sportswear executive, said the company had ordered a small amount of products from Xinjiang, and used Worldwide Responsible Accredited Production, a nonprofit certification organization, to ensure that its suppliers meet standards.

Seth Lennon, a spokesman for Worldwide, said that Hetian Taida had only recently enrolled in its program, and the organization had no information on possible coerced labor in Xinjiang. “We will certainly look into this,” he said.

Repeated calls over several days to Wu Hongbo, the chairman of Hetian Taida, went unanswered.

A state television broadcast promoting the internment camps showed textile workers at a company named Hetian Taida. The company shipped T-shirts to North Carolina last month.

Images of one camp featured in the state television broadcast, for example, show 10 to 12 large buildings with a single-story, one-room design commonly used for factories, said Nathan Ruser, a researcher at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. The buildings are surrounded by fencing and security towers, indicating that they are heavily guarded like the rest of the camp.

“It seems unlikely that any detainee would be able to go to any building that they were not taken to,” Mr. Ruser said.

Commercial registration records also show at least a few companies have been established this year at addresses inside internment camps. They include a printing factory, a noodle factory and at least two clothing and textile manufacturers at camps in rural areas around Kashgar. Another clothing and bedding manufacturer is registered in a camp in Aksu in northwestern Xinjiang.

The government’s effort to connect the internment camps with factories emerged this year as the number of detainees climbed and Xinjiang faced rising costs to build and run the camps.

Many camps were once called “transformation through education centers” by the government, reflecting their mission: inducing inmates to cast aside Islamic devotion and accept Communist Party supremacy.

But since August, the Chinese government has defended the camps by arguing that they are job training centers that will help lift detainees and their families out of poverty by giving them the skills to join China’s economic mainstream. Many rural Uighurs speak little Chinese, and language training has been advertised as one of the main purposes of the camps.

Yet the practical training in the camps often appears to be rudimentary, said Adrian Zenz, a social scientist at the European School of Culture and Theology who has studied the campaign.

An early hint of the factory labor program came in March when Sun Ruizhe, the president of the China National Textile and Apparel Council, described it to senior industry representatives, according to a transcript of his speech that was posted on industry websites.

Mr. Sun said that Xinjiang planned to recruit from three main sources to increase the textile and garment sector’s work force by more than 100,000 in 2018: impoverished households, struggling relatives of prisoners and detainees, and the camp inmates, whose training “could be combined with developing the textile and apparel section.”

In April, the Xinjiang government began rolling out a plan to attract textile and garment companies. Local governments would receive funds to build production sites for them near the camps; companies would receive a subsidy of $260 to train each inmate they took on, as well other incentives.

In remarks in October defending the camps, a top official in Xinjiang, Shohrat Zakir, said the government was busy preparing “job assignments” for inmates formally finishing indoctrination and training. A budget document earlier this year from Yarkant, a county in Kashgar, said the camps were responsible for “employment services.”

The inmates assigned to factories may have to stay for years.

Mr. Byler said a relative of a Uighur friend was sent to an indoctrination camp in March and formally released this fall. But he was then told he had to work for up to three years in a clothing factory.

A government official, Mr. Byler said, suggested to his friend’s family that if the relative worked hard, his time in the factory might be reduced.

The Chinese state media has praised the centers as leading wayward people toward modern civilization. It also reports that the workers are generously paid.

“The training will turn them from ‘nomads’ into skilled marvels,” the official Xinjiang Daily said last month. “Education and training will make them into ‘modern people,’ useful to society.”

Austin Ramzy reported from Hong Kong.

#u.s. news #international news #china #humanrights

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csrgood · 8 years ago

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Walmart Outlines 2017 Goals for American Job Growth and Community Investment

Walmart, the nation’s largest private employer with nearly 1.5 million associates in the U.S., today will discuss company plans to create American jobs and invest in local communities across the country. The investments in the coming year will support an estimated 34,000 jobs through continued expansion and improvement in the company’s store network, as well as e-commerce services, while providing specialty training for more than 225,000 of the company’s frontline associates. The company and the Walmart Foundation, in conjunction with The U.S. Conference of Mayors, are also announcing grants through the U.S. Manufacturing Innovation Fund to advance sustainability and innovation in textile manufacturing.

"Walmart is investing to better serve customers,” said Dan Bartlett, Walmart executive vice president for corporate affairs. “With a presence in thousands of communities and a vast supplier network, we know we play an important role in supporting and creating American jobs. Our 2017 plans to grow our business – and our support for innovation in the textile industry – will have a meaningful impact across the country.”

Walmart is planning $6.8 billion of capital investments in the U.S. in the coming fiscal year, which includes construction and remodeling of stores, clubs and distribution centers, as well as the expansion of new services such as Online Grocery Pickup. Walmart’s fiscal year begins Feb. 1; the company’s capital plans were first shared in October. Bartlett will discuss the company’s investments in job creation and associates -- and announce Innovation Fund grants to support the U.S. textile sector -- at the 85th Winter Meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Washington, D.C. Details are highlighted below.

American Jobs

Approximately 10,000 retail jobs created through the opening of 59 new, expanded and relocated Walmart and Sam’s Club facilities as well as e-commerce services.

An estimated 24,000 construction jobs supported through the opening of those facilities, plus the remodeling and improvement of existing U.S. facilities.

Workforce Investment

By July of this year, Walmart will open 160 new training Academies around the country, bringing the total number of Academies to 200. More than 225,000 associates will receive up to six weeks of specialty training and graduate from the academies in 2017.

The Walmart Academies are a network of facilities where frontline hourly supervisors and assistant store managers receive hands-on training in retail fundamentals, leadership skills and the specifics of how to run individual store departments. The training is designed to help associates be successful in their careers and in meeting the changing needs of customers.

U.S. Manufacturing Jobs The company’s investment in American jobs includes a 2013 commitment to purchase an additional $250 billion in American-made, grown, assembled and sourced products through 2023, estimated to help create one million jobs.*

Under the initiative, Walmart works with thousands of suppliers to help them gain access to the retailer’s shelves in stores and online. In the coming year, the program will continue to provide job-creating opportunities. Examples include:

California Innovations, producer of the Ozark Trail “super cooler.” The Canadian company with U.S. operations is moving production of the cooler from China to a factory in Atlanta, Ga., creating 350 jobs.

Edgewell Personal Care, a maker of personal hygiene products, which is bringing production from Canada to Dover, Del., creating 272 jobs.

Renfro Corporation, which will create a total of 442 jobs as a result of a deal to produce athletic socks in Fort Payne, Ala.

Textile Industry Innovation This year, the Walmart Foundation will provide $3 million in grants through the U.S. Manufacturing Innovation Fund to six leading universities working to advance sustainability and innovations in textile manufacturing, which has proven to be one of the most challenging industries to reshore to the U.S. Through the U.S. Manufacturing Innovation Fund, Walmart and the Walmart Foundation have funded $10 million in grants since 2014.

The 2017 Innovation Fund grant recipients will be announced as part of Bartlett’s remarks to U.S. mayors:

Washington State University: to establish a sustainable process to recycle cotton waste by fiber regeneration using a wet spinning technique.

North Carolina State University: to create a universal and sustainable commercial textile dyeing method that doesn't use salt or alkali; doesn’t produce effluent; and produces more than 95 percent savings of both energy and water.

Clemson University: for development of sustainable polyester fibers that achieve a high level of water and oil repellency.

Oregon State University: to develop a sustainable, cost-effective dyeing and printing of smart fabrics process.

Texas Tech University: to support research on various aspects of textile manufacturing, dyeing efficiency and specialty finishes.

University of Massachusetts Lowell: to develop magnetic dyeing technology to address the technical and environmental issues of current dyeing techniques.

* Based on data from Boston Consulting Group.

About Walmart Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (NYSE: WMT) helps people around the world save money and live better - anytime and anywhere - in retail stores, online, and through their mobile devices. Each week, nearly 260 million customers and members visit our 11,593 stores under 63 banners in 28 countries and e-commerce websites in 11 countries. With fiscal year 2016 revenue of $482.1 billion, Walmart employs approximately 2.4 million associates worldwide. Walmart continues to be a leader in sustainability, corporate philanthropy and employment opportunity. Additional information about Walmart can be found by visiting http://corporate.walmart.com on Facebook at http://facebook.com/walmart and on Twitter at http://twitter.com/walmart.

source: http://www.csrwire.com/press_releases/39626-Walmart-Outlines-2017-Goals-for-American-Job-Growth-and-Community-Investment?tracking_source=rss

#CSR #corporate social responsibility #social good #philanthropy #employee engagement #workplace givi

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