Employees Stitch Together Plan to Save Garment Mill

The workers bring their own soap, paper towels and toilet paper. They take turns cleaning the bathrooms.

They use brooms and mops from home for the plant floor, mow the grass and pick up litter on their own time, and stop by to check on the plant after hours.

Last winter, they bundled up and came to work in a building with the heat left off. This summer, they’ll wait until the heat becomes unbearable before using air-conditioning.

Vacations? None. Holidays? They’re workdays. Fringe benefits? Forget it.

At the Dawson Workers-Owned Cooperative textile plant, there are no complaints. Employees work together in an adventure in efficiency and sacrifice while apparel plants continue to disappear across the South.

“I’m very proud to work here,” said Patricia Jackson, beaming as she sewed sports jerseys. “I’m proud to be a part of a new experience, a new challenge.”

Six months ago, the mother of two was wondering how she would support her family. The plant where she had worked since 1974 had closed after 31 years. Today, she believes she has a bright future.

There have been many changes. For one, several workers chimed in, they go to the bathroom a lot less often.

But the changes go deeper--in work performance, dedication and spirit.

“We’re going to do whatever necessary to make this work,” said Dianne Williams, a 29-year employee at the plant. “We make our own decisions. It’s no longer, ‘The company say do this, do that.’ ”

“It shows what can be done if we don’t just lay down and roll over,” said Marcus Lemacks, the longtime plant manager who’s now chief executive officer.

Last Oct. 3, the plant’s New York owner closed it down, leaving about 200 workers with bleak prospects and this southwest Georgia town of 5,000 bracing for a heavy economic hit with the loss of its third-largest employer.

The thick, rusty chain and padlock hanging on the front door was an ominous symbol of the future. But the banker who foreclosed let Lemacks keep a key so he could use his office.

The key gave Lemacks an opening.

After a week of feverish brainstorming, late-night phone calls and hours-long meetings with community leaders, rural development experts and a local accountant, he and Dawson Mayor Robert Albritten emerged with an audacious plan: The plant would become a cooperative, in which each worker would be an owner, and all would have a say--and a stake--in running the plant.

Lemacks and Albritten persuaded the Southwest Georgia Rural Development Board to provide an emergency $150,000 loan, and they rounded up the workers, who hadn’t gone far.

The nearest available jobs were in Albany, 20 miles away, or Columbus, 60 miles. Many workers didn’t even own a car and knew nothing but the steadily declining apparel sector.

“At my age, my options were limited,” said 56-year-old Laura Jane Horne, who was unwilling to leave town for work because she cares for her Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother.

Devastated by the closing, she was inspired by the cooperative plan.

“We said, ‘Why not fight for it?’ ” she recounted.

The workers formed an eight-member board and agreed to pay $7.16 weekly dues--and to make whatever sacrifices were needed.

With a special 25% discount from Georgia Power Corp. and by eschewing heat, they cut their winter electric bill from $12,000 a month to $2,000. They save $200 a month on lawn work. They save $40 a month on toilet paper. And on and on.

“Needles cost 43 cents. Now, when they drop one, they pick it up,” said Lemacks, who uses the back of paper sent to him over fax machines for memos that are posted or passed around.

Lemacks, 59, a Clemson, S.C., native who’s been in textiles his entire career, courted new customers, promising higher quality, quicker turnarounds and comparable pricing with the overseas competition. If the customer needs a rush order, he promised, the cooperative will work through the weekend to get it done.

“We’ll play by any rules,” he said. “It has strengthened our position in the market.”

For competitive reasons, he won’t identify customers. But he said the cooperative will do $5 million in business this year, an increase over recent years, and will grow to 300 employees by year’s end.

Lemacks scoffed at a suggestion that the cooperative seems like an experiment in idealistic communism, noting that workers are on an incentive system that enables them to nearly double their $6.39 hourly base pay with productivity. He thinks it could be a model for other failing garment mills.

“Of course, you never want to discourage an entrepreneurial spirit,” said Roy Bowen, head of the Georgia Textile Manufacturers Assn. But he said his industry’s apparel sector, which has lost more than half of the 75,100 jobs it had in Georgia alone since 1984, is under “extreme price pressure” from cheap labor abroad.

Workers recently returned the doorway chain, which they painted gold, to the president of the Bank of Terrell, Jack Tuck. His bank, backed by federal loan guarantees, lent $1.4 million to the effort.

Tuck said the cooperative “has been marvelous. Probably the only way a domestic plant can compete in the garment business today is with sacrifices. Who better to make sacrifices than the owners?”

Albritten is confident.

“They can now control their own destiny,” he said. “They want to show the world.”