Looming Prosperity

TEXTILES Looming Prosperity

The textile industry is not ordinarily considered vital to national defense. Yet hardly any U.S. industry has come under greater pressure from the demands of the Viet Nam war than textiles. Contracts for everything from uniforms to tents and the canvas used in combat boots totaled $200 million in the last quarter of 1965, rose to $260 million in the first quarter of this year, and are expected to go up to $340 million in the second quarter. Since December, the Defense Department has been issuing priority orders for cotton fatigues and wool uniforms, thereby diverting by decree the manufacture of equivalent items away from the U.S. consumer market. As a result, textile mills are working three shifts a day, six days a week, to fill a backlog of orders that, at many plants, should keep the looms humming through the year.

Absorbing the Draft. Even without the prosperity brought on by Viet Nam war requirements, the textile industry has come a long way since the all-too-recent years when it languished under lethargic management in inefficient New England plants. Little more than a decade ago, J. P. Stevens & Co., the U.S.'s second largest textile-fabric maker, did not produce a single consumer end product; now it makes dozens, including sheets, towels, blankets, stockings and draperies. The industry also has prospered as a result of imaginative research. For example, Burlington Industries, the largest of them all (1965 sales: $1.3 billion), sells thermal-lined draperies with a thin layer of acrylic that effectively absorbs cold drafts that sift in through window frames. Possible products now undergoing final tests in Burlington labs: a carpet woven with stainless steel filaments that will eliminate static electricity; a new drapery lining that by chemical action can control the amount of light filtering through it, with the result that more light will be allowed to enter a room on dark days.

Pressing Problems. Amid all this prosperity and progress, the textile makers do have their troubles. Imports have almost quadrupled in the last decade, as foreign producers, with lower wage costs, have undercut American prices in cotton, wool, and synthetic fabrics. To keep their own wage costs down, U.S. textile firms have built nearly all their new plants in the Southeast and have vigorously opposed union attempts to organize them. Only a couple of weeks ago, the National Labor Relations Board, in an unusually strong order, ruled J. P. Stevens guilty of "flagrant" violation of federal labor laws, accused the firm of wholesale illegal firings, intimidating employees, and threatening reprisals for union activity. The company is appealing the order, which requires it to rehire 71 employees and send letters to 40,000 others pledging to mend its ways.

The industry's most pressing problem, happily enough, is expanding its now threadbare capacity to make the most of the U.S.'s rifles-plus-ruffles spending. Springs Cotton Mills (estimated 1965 sales: $250 million) has four new plants under construction, and last week J. P. Stevens started work on a $10 million synthetics factory and a $7,000,000 glass-fiber-weaving facility in South Carolina. All told, the textile makers will spend more than $1 billion on new and expanded plants this year--as much as the total invested in the last four years.

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