“We couldn’t be competitive without this type of technology.” “It wasn’t bad equipment, it’s just that the technology has been updated,” said McGuire. ![]() The latest new equipment at the 19-year-old plant, located in a town of 1,465 people near North Carolina’s rural northern border, automates a process of moving rough yarn into the final round of spinning, allowing the four workers to do a job that needed 15 to 20 people with the old gear. “We used to have people running all over each other,” recalled McGuire, 53. ![]() McGuire saw when he started his first, part-time job in a textile factory in 1973. The environment, where hundreds of machines churn away with little human intervention, is worlds away from what plant manager B.B. What’s the secret? Constant investment in automation equipment that allows the highly profitable plant to make more yarn with fewer skilled workers at a price low enough that it can export it to Honduras and the Dominican Republic, where it is knit into T-shirts to be sold by customers including Canada’s Gildan Activewear Inc. On the overnight shift, just 11 people run the plant, which sprawls over an area about the size of four football fields. ![]() The 200,000-square-foot (18,580-sq-metre) plant runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, turning out 1.5 million pounds (680,400 kg) of cotton yarn every week with a staff of just 71 people spread over three shifts. Chances are you won’t hit anybody, though you may have to foot the bill for some pricey equipment repairs.
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