Textile Industry Case Study

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Introduction The U.S. textile industry is one of the major source of employment in the manufacturing sector, with 232,000 workers. The United States is a globally competitive manufacturer of textiles, including textile raw materials, yarns, fabrics, apparel and home furnishings, and other textile finished products. The industry’s specializes is in cotton, manmade fibers, and a wide variety of yarns and fabrics. The Textile industry is technologically advanced joined with a highly skilled workforce, with an investment of $1.6 billion in total capital expenditures in 2013. In recent years, U.S. textile companies have focused on retooling their businesses, finding more effective work processes, investing in niche products and markets, and controlling …show more content…

In 1790, Samuel Slater, a cotton spinner's apprentice who left England the year before with the secrets of textile machinery, built a factory from memory to produce spindles of yarn.The factory had 72 spindles, powered by nine children pushing foot treadles, soon replaced by water power. Three years later, John and Arthur Shofield, built the first factory to manufacture woolens in Massachusetts. From these modest early stages to the time of the Civil War there were over two million spindles in over 1200 cotton factories and 1500 woolen factories in the United States. (The Rise of American Industry …show more content…

The NUTW emphasized the need for workers to unite to demand a just wage for the jobs they performed. The union's push into the South was successful, with the help of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and its skilled craft unionists. By the late 1890s, the union had established 95 different locals in the Southeast. However the NUTW's defeat at the turn-of-the-century ushered in the era of "Yellow Dog" contracts, where workers had to renounce unions. (The Southern Textile Industry) The United Textile Worker of America The United Textile Workers of America (UTWA), another AFL textile union, pushed into the South following the NUTW's defeat. In 1913 organizers found a potential windfall at the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills in Atlanta. A strike by workers at the sprawling mill in 1914 and 1915 proved an early flashpoint in the UTWA's efforts to organize Southern mill

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