Winston-Salem Journal from Winston-Salem, North Carolina • 8

PAGE A8 W1X5T0N SUEM Jot KVAI Sunday December 182005 ROM PAGE ONE UNII Continued rom Page Al elsewhere for work "Unifi always was our manufacturing gem" said Cecil Wood the county manager was sufficient Just as things are changing for Unifi things will change for the county" Caudle is one person who has al ready felt the changes She is an unpre tentious 59 ycar old woman who lives in Boonville with her two beloved Jack Russell terriers keep me she said Ever since Unifi laid her off Caudle has cleaned houses for a living She makes $10 an $4 less than what she made at Unifi Most of all she misses her bld work at the plant been easy tried to lock it out of my mind and go on" Caudle says with a tremor in iier voice not angry 1 just Quick expansion When Unifi was founded in 1971 it employed about 200 workers Starting salary was $3 an hour Its first plant was a bare bones building of 75000 square feet on Old US 421 from the beginning main business was poly ester textur izing That pi or ess starts with a material known as tially oriented a thin iilament that looks as shiny and is as fine as a strand of human hair In one of texturiz ing plants the filament is stretched heated and twisted to give it texture and other qualities This controls how the yarn will feel against the skin "When we texturize it we give it bulk we give it stretch we give it some said Bariy Shore manager of polyester operations who has worked at the company for 27 years After its founding Unifi expanded quickly It increased its workforce and its capacity It opened new plants in Yadkinville throughout the state and eventually around the world When it faced competition from other yarn manufacturers in the re gion it simply gobbled them up The company flourished because it pro duced a high volume of low cost prod ucts and it did so more efficiently than its rivals hail a very strong customer base" said Tom Caudle vice president for global operations in an interview at the company's headquar ters in Greensboro "We ran our plants full It was very lean manufacturing very low cost manufacturing We spent a lot of money on automating process es so we could take cost out" BARRY SHORE A 'L' A changing market As long as demand for its yarn re mained strong this efficient igh vol ume business model allowed Unifi to thrive But in the 1990s the worldwide textile market especially in China and other parts of Asia exploded Cheap foreign imports mainly surged American fabric makers and others who had bought yarn from Unifi went bankrupt or came close About five years ago Unifi reached its break ing point of the problem for Unifi was that it built up a very specialized capa said Peter Kilduff a professor of textile and apparel management at the JOURNAL PHOTOS BY JENNIER ROTENIZER jKM to Jfk Bp IMaO' SBBstP'VSl At this plant In Yadkin County Unifi makes yarn from plastic pellets that resemble baby teeth xfcnf Hoii an i8 JIB Kaye lippin who has worked for Unifi In Yadkin County for 27 years remembers when the floors were dirt University of North Carolina at Greens boro was a capability that re quired a large anil fairly stable domes tic market And that market has been eroded fairly rapidly" Unifi is doing its best to adapt It produces a much wider variety of products than it used to and it has a renewed focus on high end branded products such as the Sorbtek fiber which is used in active wear It also just started a joint venture project in China where it hopes to market specialty fibers have to continue to continue to come up with in our case new fibers that do something differ ent" said William Lowe vice president and chief operating officer efforts however have not overcome new worldwide and regional market forces The company has not made a profit since 2000 Its stock price has nose dived from more than $40 a share in the late 1990s to about $3 a share last week It has been forced to close plants cut jobs and consolidate opera tions relentlessly Since 2000 American work force has decreased from 5126 to 3431 All of these measures have affected operations in Yadkin County Since 2000 the number of Unifi em ployees in Yadkin has dropped from 1714 to 1111 properly values in Yadkin are also shrinking and as a result so is the amount of tax revenue the county col lects from Unifi In 2000 Unifi paid $21 million in county property taxes In 2005 it paid $900000 difficult to say how a sale or merger of Unifi would affect workers in Yadkin or at any of the other locations It is possible that own ership of the company could change hands while operations and work force remained mostly unaffected On the other hand even a partial sale of certain Unifi assets could be quite disruptive depending on the buyer Kilduff speculated that portions of Yadkinville operations could be lucrative acquisitions for foreign in vestors investors who might be more interested in purchasing technology and market share than in retaining its on thc ground opera tions An uncertain future Yadkin officials say they are opti mistic that Unifi will stay in Yadkin in some capacity even if it never returns to its glory days "I expect them to be here a long said Bobby Todd the executive director of the Yadkin County Chamber of Commerce the efficiency of their plant their equipment is mod ern and the facilities are here Why move Unifi executives make no promises The future pfYadkin's Unifi plants they said rests solely on financial consider ations Asked if Unifi feels a special alle giance to the Yadkin community be cause it has been a fixture in the county for so long Lowe said simply: "As long as the facilities in Yadkinville can remain competitive with the products that running in them then those facilities have a continued Are the facilities currently competi tive? are competitive today" Lowe said there continue to be more costs in those facilities than like to The company recently put up one of its plant buildings for sale but five other Yadkinville plants continue to operate One of those plants is a new state of the art facility known as on Unifi Industrial Road When it opened in 1997 it was crown jewel: a highly efficient behemoth that looms like a silver fortress on a hill Inside it has over a million square feet of thun dering machinery and it is a reminder of the one time status An Irreplaceable asset Nearly everyone in Yadkin County agrees on one thing: Unifi is irreplace able No current or potential business could affect the county's economy as much as Unifi did for so many years When Unifi came to Yadkin County the economic mainstay was tobacco farming Even today the county is still mostly farmland and Unifi remains the lead ing industrial presence There was never much of a need to attract other industries because Unifi supported the county virtually on its own The company was not only largest employer but also a consistent supporter of community projects Bvo county fixtures the YMCA and the swimming pool would never have been built if not for over 1 million in donations from Unifi Now the county is hard pressed to cope with decline Officials stress economic development and di versification But most of the county lacks the public water and sewer that is critical for industrial development and the county has very few empty buildings into which businesses can move "One of our largest obstacles to growth continues to be capital invest Todd said "1 think Yadkin is like a lot of other rural counties We have depended on a growing industrial base to offset our tax base but we have not kept up with the capital needs of our Indeed Unifi alone allowed Yadkin County to attain a level of economic autonomy that the county had never seen before and may never see again 7" Todd recalled that before ar rival nearly everyone who a farmer commuted to Winston Salem to work for companies such as Hanes and RJ Reynolds Tobacco Wood suggested that thecounty could be heading back to a similar sit uation 7 "Twenty years down the road going to be more of a bedroom com munity to orsyth County than we are now" he said Wood acknowledged that a touchy issue Yadkin residents like to maintain a separate identity from the big city across the Yadkin River But people have to find jobs somewhere and it's hard to know how much longer be able to find them inside a Unifi plant is certainly a leader in what they Wood said make anything beyond that promise to do all they can to be a viable company and remain here None of us knowhow the future will lames Romoser can be reached at 727 7284 or at jromoserwsournalcom SPYING Continued rom Page Al i 1 time Already the Bush admin I istration is under fire because of allegations that the United States is running secret prisons in Eastern Europe and shipping suspected terrorists to other countries for harsh interroga tions The NSA program's existence i surfaced as the administration and its GOP allies on Capitol I fill were fighting to save the expir ing provisions of the USA Act the domestic anti terrorism law enacted after the attacks of Sept 11 2001 In a stinging failure for Bush Democrats and a few Republi cans succeeded riday in stalling its renewal They say that the law gives so much lati 1 tude to law enforcement offi cials that it threatens Ameri constitutional liberties So Bush scrapped the version of his weekly radio speech that he had taped on recent elec tions in Iraq and made a live speech from the White Roosevelt Room on the Patriot I Act and the NSA program I Often appearing angry in his eight minute speech Bush lashed out at the senators who blocked the Patriot renew i al calling them irresponsible He also made clear that he has no intention of ending his authorizations of the monitoring activities and said that the public disclosure of the spy operation endangered Americans Bush said that his authority to approve what he called a "vital tool in our war against the terrorists" came from his consti tutional powers as commander in chief He said that he has per sonally signed off on reautho rizations more than 30 times since the Sept 11 attacks The American people expect me to do everything in my power under our laws and Con stitution to protect them and their civil liberties" Bush said "And that is exactly what I will continue to do so long as I'm the president of the United James Bamford the author of two books on the National Secu rity Agency said that the pro gram could be problematic be cause it bypasses a special court set up by the 1978 oreign Intel ligence Surveillance Act to au thorize eavesdropping on sus pected terrorists "I hear him specify any legal right except his right as president which in a democracy make much Bam ford said in an interview what Bush said is he went around the law which is a viola tion of the That view was echoed by congressional Democrats "I tell you President George Bush not King George Bush This is not the system of government we have and that we fought Sen Russell ingold Wis said Sen Patrick Leahy Vt said: Bush administration seems to believe it is above the law" Republican Sen Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania the chairman of the Senate Committee said riday that the NSA program is inappropriate and promised hearings soon Bush defended the program as narrowly designed and used "consistent with US law and the Constitution" He said that it is employed only to intercept the international communica tions of people inside the Unit ed States who have been deter mined to have "a clear to al Qaida or related terrorist or ganizations Government officials have re fused do disclose the standards to establish such a link or how many people are monitored Bush also said that members of the congressional leadership have been briefed more than 12 times on the activities The program is designed in part to fix problems found after the 2001 attacks in which it came to be learned that two of the suicide hijackers were com municating from San Diego with al Qaida operatives overseas Bush had harsh words for those who disclosed tlte program to the media saying that they acted improperly and illegally "As a result our enemies have learned information they should not have" Bush said "The unau thorized disclosure of this effort damages our national security and puts our citizens at risk" DEATHS Continued rom Page Al members could be reached and which names had been re leased by state officials Nonetheless the study rep resents the most comprehen sive picture to date of the Louisiana victims of Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent levee failures The Times con ducted more than 200 inter views with relatives neighbors and friends of the victims and it culled information from area coroners and medical examin ers census data obituaries and news articles The interviews add narra tive and nuance to what has been a largely anonymous or purely statistical casualty list Relatives were able to explain that what might have been list ed as a simple drowning was really a tragic end to a rescue or that medical care just a few minutes earlier might have meant the difference between life and death In New Orleans almost three quarters of the black vic tims reviewed by the Times and almost half the white victims lived in neighborhoods in which the average income was less than $43000 the overall average In New Orleans the median income for whites is almost twice that of blacks Many if not most were Louisiana natives and virtually all were members of the work ing class janitors barbers merchant marines Among them was Althea Lala 76 who had a heart attack while trying to saw through her roof Prosper Louis lint blind diabetic and dehydrated was one of at least 19 people who died on Interstate 10 in the hot sun waiting for help to come according to the state health department Donise Marie Davis 28 fell to her deiith from the rope of a rescue helicopter Todd Lopez 42 pushed his family into an attic before the water overtook him State officials have released the names of only 512 victims less than half of the estimat ed deaths in the state and have provided just a skeletal demographic breakdown showing that most were 65 or older about half were black and about half were female Despite repeated requests nei ther state officials nor the coro ner of Orleans Parish where the bulk of the deaths occurred have released causes of death and Louisiana death certifi cates are not public record More than 60 families told the Times that they still did not know how or in some cases even where their loved ones perished As a result a full por trait remains impossible Because of bodies that washed away or have not yet been found a full accounting of the dead may not be available for months or even years But more than 1400 victims from along the Gulf Coast have been counted including some who evacuated and whose deaths may later be determined to be unrelated to the storm Bodies were found floating alongside refrigerators wedged under furniture lashed to telephone poles or covered by makeshift shrouds School buses arrived al shel ters with some of their passen gers already dead The deaths tell of individual stubbornness helplessness and selflessness the hardships of poverty aging and disability and the effects of government policy Some victims became em blematic of the horror in New Orleans and the inefficiency of the government response There was Vera Smith whose improvised grave proclaimed lies Vera God help Of the 126 people who were not in a nursing home or hos pital yet did not evacuate only 25 families said that trans portation was an issue al though there could be many more such victims because the Times study was less likely to include the homeless or those with no license or other official documents Others said that victims re fused to leave because they had survived earlier hurri canes were worried about their property or pets or were simply obstinate I a I.