N.C. Factory Closure Hurts Locals

Company Collapse Largest Single Layoff In North Carolina's History

(CBS)  This is the 16th in a month-long series of reports called "Making Ends Meet" about how families are coping with the tough economy, unemployment and smaller retirement accounts.

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Cynthia Graham only feels alone. She's not.

"I just don't basically know what a lot of us are going to do,” says Graham. "It's over 4,000 of us."

In Kannapolis, North Carolina, the Pillowtex plant was everyone's security blanket, reports CBS News Correspondent Mark Strassmann.

Then the mill closed for good.

Graham told Strassmann that the hardest part of this is “just standing here” and looking “at this place knowing they could have done better by me than they did after knowing I gave them half of my life."

Pillowtex was America's second-leading maker of towels, with brand names like Cannon, Fieldcrest and Royal Velvet.

Cheap imports caused its collapse. And America's textiles industry looks more threadbare than ever.

In Kannapolis, these were good jobs that are never coming back.

"Generally when these people go back to work they are taking a 40-50 percent cut in what they were making in their manufacturing jobs," says Judy Henderson of the Employment Security Commission.

For many people here, Pillowtex was their life. And they're scared. Now the plant, the job and that life they knew are all gone — gone for good.

Their prospects look grim.

Jobless people like Jim Wilburn, with few marketable skills and dwindling resources.

Now Winburn says he has to say a whole lot of prayers and hope that he can find a job.

Dozens of people already face foreclosure. Even more eat from the brown bag of charity.

"I have to figure out how I'm going to make it off of $163 a week with the medication I'm on and the bills that I got to pay," says Graham, holding her unemployment check.

Manufacturing states like North Carolina now struggle to make a new start to create fresh hope.

"We are working on a transition that has, as you can tell, a very dramatic consequence on families in the short run," says Jim Fain of the North Carolina Secretary of Commerce.

Families like Jim Winburn's.

Winburn tells Strassmann that when hears talk that there’s an economic recover in this country that Wilburn thinks it's a joke.

“It's a joke,” says Wilburn. “That's like driving you car in a river and thinking it's gonna float. That's not gonna happen."

Not in places like Kannapolis, not any time soon.