Charlotte County community recovering from plant closing

by Robert Burke
for Virginia Business
July 2005

It’s been a tough few months in Southside Virginia’s Charlotte County. In March, Georgia-based WestPoint Stevens Inc. shuttered the textile plant that for decades had been the biggest employer in the tiny community of Drakes Branch. When the doors closed, it meant the end of 450 jobs.

The plant’s closing was the latest in a series of blows that the state’s flagging textile industry has suffered in recent years. But work on rebuilding the job base began quickly. The Virginia Economic Development Partnership “came out even before the closing and looked at the facility so they could immediately have it on their radar screen,” says Stephanie Heintzle-man, the county’s economic development director. Gov. Mark R. Warner visited Charlotte in February and two months later announced a $1.1 million grant to the South Central Workforce Investment Board to help retrain unemployed textile workers.

WestPoint Stevens executives blamed the closing — part of 21 percent reduction in its work force — in part on the end of World Trade Organization quotas on textile imports from foreign competitors in lower-wage countries. None of that means much to the laid-off workers, many of whom had been with the plant for decades.

But throughout Southside people know the old economy isn’t coming back. “We are going to see a shift of some kind,” says Shawn Rozier, director of the Virginia Workforce Center in Charlotte Court House. The extra resources are needed — in the three weeks after the plant closed the local work force center saw about 250 workers, Rozier says. “We were open nights and weekends just to see all these folks in as rapid a clip as we could.”

The Southside Virginia Community College has been offering computer training courses, and applicants can get financial help to cover tuition costs. It also offers training in operating heavy equipment. And the work force centers are marketing on-the-job training programs in which they cover half the wages of new hires while they’re learning the job.
But most jobs are still outside the region and commuting isn’t easy when gasoline is $2 a gallon. “We have a good labor force and a lot of people would like to be driving a lot less, but you do what you have to do to make ends meet,” Rozier says. “The jobs may not be here but we have to help the people who are.”

The county is trying to attract employers from sectors such as wood products, plastics and metal working, as well as distribution centers. But finding a few hundred jobs will take time. Two years ago a medical supply company opened an assembly and distribution facility in the county and brought with it about 30 jobs, Rozier says. “That’s been a good thing, but we need a few more of those.”