A North Carolina Textile Co-op Gives Immigrant Workers a Stake in the Business
When Walter Vicente came home from school as a kid in Guatemala, he helped cut and sew button-down shirts for his older brother’s small textile business. All the brothers in the family were involved in different parts of the operation, from selling the shirts on the street to working the machines.
“This is what I was doing since I was little,” Vicente said. “This is what I like to do.”
Twenty-five years later, Vicente still works at a textile business, this time in North Carolina. It’s not a family business, but it’s what some would call the next best thing: a worker-owned cooperative. And it’s showing that immigrants can play a leading role in bringing back the United States' declining apparel sector, not just as labor but as owners and decision-makers.
At the same time that Vicente was learning the textile business in his home country, Molly Hemstreet was seeing the industry close up shop in her hometown of Morganton, North Carolina. Factory by factory, what had been the largest employer in town was picking up and moving out. Between 1992 and 2012, the number of workers employed in making clothing and other fabric products in North Carolina fell by about 88 percent, from about 95,000 to only 11,400.
“I grew up in this generation when all these companies left,” Hemstreet said. “People worked on Friday and didn’t have work on Monday.”
Hemstreet wanted to find a way to create a new kind of clothing factory—one that wouldn’t so easily be led away by the lure of cheaper wages.
In 2008, she founded Opportunity Threads, a worker-owned cut-and-sew plant built on a threefold ethical platform: social, environmental, and economic benefits for the local community..........
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