ROBBINSVILLE — Stanley Furniture Co. workers will start the drive home Friday by passing through the plant’s guardhouse gate, just as some have done for most of their adult lives.

But it won’t be a typical day. The shift’s end begins a two-week round of layoffs that will cut the plant’s work force of 450 people by about half while pushing Graham County toward a future much different from today.

Stanley is the county’s largest employer. If you don’t work at the plant, you are probably in construction or work for the government.

Before the layoffs, the plant accounted for 10 percent of the county’s work force. Employees there make the Virginia-based company’s Young America line of youth bedroom furniture. The company says it is cutting jobs because of foreign competition.

Everyone in this isolated county of 8,000 people will feel the layoffs in some way.

“It is going to really hurt everything,” said Lynn Brown, who with her husband, Billy, owns Lynn’s Place, a restaurant in downtown Robbinsville that’s packed with locals most days for lunch. “It’s sort of scary.”

The people here are a close-knit group. One reason for that is there’s no quick way to get to Graham County. It’s about 100 miles west of Asheville in the northwestern corner of North Carolina. The trip takes about two hours.

With the Stanley plant layoffs, Graham County is at a crossroads. Its unemployment rate of 6.9 percent in December ranked as North Carolina’s seventh-highest while its second-home construction rate, adjusted for population, is the second-highest. At least three new restaurants are opening soon.

“That kind of tells you what we are becoming,” said the Rev. Noah Crowe, leader of the First Baptist Church.

Graham takes care of its own
Crowe and his congregation of 250 have prayed about the layoffs. He has church members who are in management at the plant and members who are losing their jobs.

Crowe said he has been impressed with how much the company has tried to soften the blow. The plant filed unemployment paperwork for its employees. It brought Tri-county Community College in to survey the needs and skills of workers. It has applied for federal money for worker re-education. And it has allowed people time off for job interviews.

“We are doing all that we can do to ease the transition of our associates and help them enroll in training programs for new careers,” said Dennis Taggert, Stanley’s vice president of human resources.

But that’s nothing new in Graham. If you’re from here, you’re part of a big family.

“As needs come up, you have no doubt that the churches in our community and the community itself will come out and support one another and help each other,” Crowe said.
Brown, the restaurant owner, agreed.

“When anything happens, Graham County pulls together and tries to help each other,” she said.
Many of the Stanley plant’s 168 displaced workers will find themselves back in a classroom decades after leaving school. And they’ll need the community’s support to make the transition, say people who work in the education field.

Life after a layoff
Diane Owl knows what the workers at Stanley are feeling.

She lost her job of 20 years in neighboring Cherokee County when the Levi plant closed in 1999. She started working there in 1973 after she quit high school.

She got her General Education Development diploma while on the job. When the plant closed, she made the next step into college.

Owl is now the director of financial aid at Tri-County Community College. She’s making more money than she could have made at the plant and loves her new career. And she is working on a bachelor’s degree.

“In a way, it was kind of a blessing for me,” she said.

But the road ahead for the Stanley workers won’t be easy. The college surveyed 136 workers who will be laid off and found 27 percent never finished high school. Some didn’t make it past eighth grade.

The average pay at the plant is $10.77 an hour. The average time at the plant for the workers who are leaving was about seven years.

“When they lose that job, they are going to be just like I was,” Owl said. “They are not going to know what direction to take, what would be their next step and even what kind of field of work they would want to re-enter in.”

Owl said the workers will worry about money, and they might fear going back to a classroom. The single parents, especially, will have a hard time paying the bills while going to school.

But there is government money to help with tuition and expenses. And the newcomers to school will find they are not alone — many of their classmates will be the same age and have the same background. Those who want to find a new career can do it, Owl said.

Donna Tipton-Rogers, the vice president of Tri-County Community College’s Graham operations, said the school and the state Employment Security Commission developed a plan to help the workers get back into school as soon as they heard about the layoffs last year. She said Stanley officials have worked hard to help.

The college has already had meetings inside the plant. It will hold more in-depth information sessions starting Feb. 26 at the Robbinsville campus. The meetings are open to anyone who wants to learn about the educational and job opportunities that are out there.

“We are going to do everything we can to make it easy for them,” she said.

Brenda Trammel, who has worked at the plant for 3 1/2 years, is one of the workers staying on.
She said the company gave workers a two-month notice to get used to the idea of layoffs, and that has helped ease the situation. She said at first workers were worried. But now, she said, many are excited about going back to school.

Trammel said she would miss her co-workers.

“It’s going to be like a different plant,” she said.

Changes coming
A map on the wall of Mayor Bobby Cagle Jr.’s office at Robbinsville Town Hall shows the circuitous route of the long-promised Corridor K highway. The four-lane is designed to connect Asheville with Chattanooga, Tenn.

North Carolina, in some form, has been working on the road for 40 years. It’s still not completed.
The road, says Cagle and the long list of leaders who preceded him, would change Graham County forever. Instead of being a side trip, the county would be a stop on a main road. Jobs and development might follow.

Corridor K could change Graham County the way Interstate 40 and U.S. 23-74 changed other communities west of Asheville decades ago.

When Cagle asks about money for the road, he’s often told it will come. But so far, North Carolina and the federal government haven’t written the checks. The road’s four lanes end just after Fontana Lake.

“We are off the beaten path,” the mayor said.

But the future in Graham is looking up in some ways. Underground fiber optic lines are planned as part of the BalsamWest FiberNet project.

The infrastructure could mean technology jobs like software design. And it could allow people to telecommute to bigger cities while living and working in Graham County.

Other mountain communities have found success in this. Drake Software in Franklin, which is funding the fiber optics loop along with the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, is a good example.
Cagle said the decision to cut the work force at Stanley shows manufacturing in the mountains is not coming back. He said tourism, service jobs, and construction and technology jobs are the future of Graham County.

That’s not to say he has given up on recruiting someone who could put the people at Stanley back to work. He’s just not expecting it.

The number of furniture manufacturing jobs in North Carolina fell from 80,101 in 1995 to 56,806 in 2005, according to state figures. Stanley’s decision to cut its work force comes just two years after the company announced an expansion at its Graham County plant.

“If there is an industry out there that wants to locate in the heart of the Great Smoky Mountains, come to Graham County,” he said. “We’d love to have you.”