With the final goodbye of Springs Global in Piedmont approaching next week, city leaders and company executives agree – the impact won’t be as bad as it could.The textile manufacturing company announced its closure in December 2007. Production is being moved to Mexico following the 2006 merger of Springs Industries, Inc. with Brazil’s Coteminas.
Some 325 jobs will be lost with the closure.
Piedmont Mayor Charlie Fagan said the city has known for some time the textile production plant would eventually close. Ever since the closure of the Fifth Avenue plant in 2006, Fagan said the city had expected the U.S. 278 plant to eventually follow.
“It has been a long, slow process,” Fagan said. “It’s not something that just happened all of the sudden, and that has definitely eased the pain.”
Fagan said the economic outlook for the city after the closure is far better than it could have been thanks to the foresight of the City Council and other city leaders. He said when they created the city’s budget for this fiscal year, they factored in the potential loss in utility sales at $1 million.
The Springs Global Fifth Avenue plant was completely supplied by city utilities. The U.S. 278 location was primarily supplied by city gas, water and sewer, Fagan said.
But despite the planning, Fagan said the “loss is still a loss.”
“We have planned this and I feel like we’ve done a good job with our budget to foresee this,” Fagan said. “We’re trying to stay ahead of the forecast as best we can to have the least impact on the city as possible.”
Fagan and City Clerk Bill Fann said the most important thing now is to find another industry to fill the empty buildings left behind in order to start generating that utility revenue again and provide local residents with more jobs.
Garcy, a retail fixtures company owned by Leggett & Platt Store Fixtures Group, is a potential company to fill the vacant U.S. 278 building, but even with that, the city would still be left with the Fifth Avenue building and two buildings on the current Garcy property in the Industrial Park, Fagan said.
“We got to definitely get out here and solicit industries and bring in some new companies and try to seek some new jobs,” Fagan said. “That’s something we’ve got to do quick.”
While the economic outlook of the city is a pressing concern to city leaders, the employees of Springs Global and the impact on them are of a higher importance, said Fann.
“Those people have given a large part of their life with the expectation of having a career and being able to retire based on that,” Fann said. “And what are they left with now?”
Fann said he is concerned about the benefits paid to the employees that were within only a few years of retirement.
Springs Global Plant Manager Donnie Little said the company provides its employees with their full 401K and profit sharing benefits. He said an employee is “fully vested” after five years of employment.
Little said employees receiving these benefits would be able to roll the money over into an IRA, spend it or re-invest it in another way.
“We are losing jobs, not the investment,” Little said in an interview in March. “We haven’t lost the investment that the company has placed on the employees. That’s in a separate pool of money that these people will be entitled to.”
Company executives and city leaders are also concerned about the possibility of a number of workers having to move out of the city for new jobs or be forced to commute long distances.
Even with finding another job in a city close to Piedmont, workers may still not be able to afford the daily commute. Fann said he is concerned with workers like this because that could force them to move, thus taking away from enrollment in the city’s schools and the amount of shopping they do in the city.
Fagan is more hopeful for the city’s population totals, even after the closure, saying that many of Springs Global’s employees already lived outside the city limits. He said U.S. Census Bureau reports have shown the largest influx of people living within the city limits in the last four years than he has seen in the past 20 years. “As far as migration, that’s been something that has been going on for a long time, so I really don’t think it will have a major impact,” Fagan said.
To soften the blow of a change in employment, all Springs Global employees were offered a severance package, said Little. Lisa Kelley, human resources assistant at Spring Global, said the amounts and duration of the package were based on the number of years of employment.
Little said the support the company has given its workers has exceeded what some industrial companies provide theirs. “There are so many companies today that when a plant is shut down, in some cases, they don’t give anything,” he said. “And in a lot of cases it’s a two-week or one-month package and then a ‘See you later, tough luck’ kind of thing.”
But Springs Global is providing its workers with “ample” support following the closure, Little said. “[Springs Global] invested money in its employees, that it didn’t have to, to help the people during this period of time to offset some of their financial losses,” he said.
The company has also worked closely with the aid provided federal Trade Assistance Act. Workers were given applications and information on the benefits they could receive through the act at a series of meetings prior to the plant’s closure, Kelley said.
The FTA provides displaced workers financial assistance to go back to school and earn their degree. Little said the potential for workers to take hold of new opportunities may be the best thing they could ever do. “This closure is going to push one group of people to go get educated and try something new,” he said. “And life will probably be better for them.”
Piedmont City Councilman Kenny Kelley said one of his co-workers’ wives has taken the opportunity to go to nursing school. “It’s going to be good for some people,” Kelley said. “And then for some people it’s going to hurt.”
For the people it’s going to hurt, Fann said he is most concerned. “The biggest impact on us is the impact on those workers because they are our friends and neighbors, and we care about them,” he said.
He said while the city is hopeful for the workers of Springs Global and the impact its closure has on the city, the reality of it is still bleak.
“The fact of the matter is, it’s just not that rosy,” Fann said. “They’ve had a direct impact on the lives of a lot of people by making corporate decisions that don’t have any human level to them.”
But aside from the disappointing outlook for some of the company’s workers, Fagan said he is still optimistic when it comes to the city’s future.
“I think because of the way it has happened, it’s definitely softened it and made it much more manageable and much more bearable,” Fagan said. “We’re going to survive. We’ll just have to adjust accordingly.”
