Furniture worker's skills won't take him far

Harvey Billings has worked at mills in Elkin since he quit high school in the ninth grade.

He has spent his working life making upholstery, running a tin machine and, most recently, setting up machines that cut notches in wood for furniture. His job and about 400 others will end in January when Elkin's Vaughan-Bassett furniture factory closes. The company cites competition from Asia and the recent economic downturn as reasons for closing its only North Carolina plant.

Billings, 55, has been there for 21 years.

"I don't know what I'm going to do now. I'll have to find something," he said. "It'll be all right if you can find something like you've been doing. But it's going to be hard."

Statewide the unemployment rate reached 7 percent in October.

Essentially, it has already become as bad or worse as the past two recessions, said Anne Bacon, the senior director of workforce development for the N.C. Rural Economic Development Center. The last time it was that high was in 1990 and 2002.

In Surry County, the unemployment rate topped 8 percent this month. The county has a labor force of about 35,000. Close to 3,000 of those people are unemployed.

"When you're being laid off in large numbers in the same industry, using the same skills, that makes it even more difficult to find employment," said Bobbi Wessling, the manager of the N.C. Employment Security Commission in Mount Airy. "That's compounded with the fact that most of the type of industries who would use those skills have closed their doors."

Billings began working at Vaughan-Bassett when was 34 years old and still living with his parents, he said.

The company started him out at $3.35 an hour. He learned various jobs, mostly having to do with making forms or templates for furniture.

He made friends there, he said, and they became like a family.

Billings even met his wife, Phyllis, at the plant. The couple moved to a place in northern Wilkes County near her family, then to a mobile home behind his parents' house in State Road, where they live now.

Mill work helped them raise a family and keep food on the table. Billings has a daughter who is now 26. And he and his wife have a daughter together. She is 17.

It used to be that workers could leave one mill in town and find job offers at two others the same day, Phyllis Billings said.

At one point, she left Vaughan-Bassett to work at the Blythe Home Scents candle factory in Elkin. She worked there for 15 years until she was laid off in 2007. About two months ago, she began working third shift at the Phillips Van Heusen distribution center in Jonesville.

The couple know how to survive a layoff, she said, but they worry this time that finding similar work won't come so easily.

"Right now, we live paycheck to paycheck. This Christmas instead of buying gifts for everyone we decided just to buy for our own families and have a big meal at Momma and Daddy's," said Phyllis Billings, who is 53 and has a large extended family. "We really got to cut back."

There has been a lot of success in retraining workers for other jobs, said Andy James, a spokesman for the Employment Security Commission in Raleigh.

A lot of younger workers choose to go back to school, but workers who are anywhere from 40 to 55 years old are in a difficult position, he said. The question for them will be whether they want to go into another field and start over.

"We try to help counsel them. It's not easy," he said. "To work somewhere for 15 to 20 to 25 years and not be at retirement age, you've got a set of skills and you're one of the best in the world at it, but nobody wants your skills."

Some companies can apply for benefits for their employees through the Trade Adjustment Assistance Act program that pays for college tuition, mostly for job training, and extends unemployment benefits from 26 weeks up to two years.

For Harvey Billings, that would mean starting with GED classes, something he's not so sure he'd like to do.

He'd rather find work at another mill, he said.

"If I had everything paid for, I'd be all right," Billings said. "I ain't got no car payment, but I have a house payment."

Billings, a tall man with a soft voice, says he tries not to panic or let it bother him.

But since he learned that the plant will shut down, he thinks about how it will affect his family's Christmas and how next Christmas could be worse.

There's also the loss of identity. Billings had built a life around his work at Vaughan-Bassett.

"I like the people I work with. I think the world of the people who work there," he said.

"I don't know what I'll do now."

■ Sherry Youngquist can be reached in Mount Airy at 336-789-9338 or at syoungquist@wsjournal.com.