Employers to meet with Cone Denim employees from closing White ... - Winston-Salem Journal

GREENSBORO — Laid-off employees of Cone Denim won’t have to hit the streets to hunt for work when their plant closes.

At least 11 textile and other manufacturers are ready to interview some 200 workers who will lose their jobs when the White Oak Plant closes at the end of the year.

Company spokeswoman Delores Sides said this week that Cone Denim will hold a job fair on Wednesday at the Revolution Mill office and residential complex, which has donated space for the veteran employees to talk with their potential next employers.

More than 20 companies expressed interest in the job fair, Sides said, and “we are still in the process of confirming who is able to attend.” Confirmed companies are:

• Gildan Yarn
• FairyStone Fabrics
• Burlington Technologies
• Ralph Lauren
• Resource Manufacturing
• Copland Fabrics
• Carolina Narrow Fabrics
• Workforce Unlimited
• St. John Packaging
• Mount Vernon Mills
• Herbalife

“In addition, we have worked closely with the Workforce Development group who has conducted educational seminars and workshops with employees to assist with job searches and preparing resumes,” Sides said. “Additional sessions are planned for December.”

In what Greensboro Mayor Nancy Vaughan called a “gut punch” to the city’s business tradition, Cone’s owner, International Textile Group, said in October its plant would close at the end of December after 112 years of operation.

As millions of consumers wore jeans made at the plant, thousands of Greensboro workers raised families for more than a century on wages they earned at White Oak, building a culture and a corporate legacy that now survives only as a brand name in the city of its origin.

For the first time since the late 1800s, workers in Greensboro no longer will make a product under the name Cone, one of the city’s indelible founding families.

White Oak, once the world’s largest denim plant, at 1.6 million square feet with 2,500 workers at its peak, has been hailed in recent years as an innovative survivor in an economy that has been brutal for the textile industry, using its vintage looms to make denim in small batches for high-fashion jeans.

But the company said in a news release that “changes in market demand in recent years have significantly reduced order volume at the facility.” The cost of operating a cavernous plant with a fraction of its peak production levels was too high, the company said.

In a bittersweet touch, Greensboro-based Wrangler will sell jeans made from one of the last runs of fabric milled at White Oak in its pop-up store that opens Friday in downtown Greensboro.

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