Factory jobs trickle back to the U.S., giving hope to a once-booming mill town
Marriott is returning textile manufacturing jobs to domestic shores, joining other U.S. companies that have recently opted to return production jobs to the U.S. Marriott announced last week that towels for all 3,000 of its U.S. properties would be manufactured by Standard Textile in Georgia and South Carolina, returning jobs to states that had once been thriving centers of textile production. In the past 15 years, manufacturing has made a slow return as companies re-invest in new technology that allows more efficient production at more affordable costs. The U.S. lost 30% of its manufacturing jobs between 1998 and 2016, with 12.3 million workers on payroll as of February 2016, up from 11.5 million in 2010. Communities such as Thomaston, Georgia, which previously had a thriving textile industry, has seen the return of 280 textile jobs, a far cry from its hey-day of 4,000 textile employees, but a sign of improvement in a town with rising poverty levels when manufacturing jobs left the area in 2001. Marriott’s decision to invest in local textile production will return 150 jobs to the U.S.
See "Factory jobs trickle back to the U.S., giving hope to a once-booming mill town", Abha Bhattarai, The Washington Post, March 17, 2016