Tag: textiles

OM in the News: Smart Clothes Hope to Revive the U.S. Textile Industry

Preforms, which are heated up to draw out the fibers, which are then woven together to create a functional fabric.
Preforms, which are heated up to draw out the fibers, which are then woven together to create a functional fabric.

The U.S. Defense Department, MIT, and 50 companies have joined in an ambitious $320 million advanced fabric project to push the American textile industry into the digital age, reports The New York Times (April 1, 2016). Key to the plan is a technical ingredient: embedding a variety of tiny semiconductors and sensors into fabrics that can see, hear, communicate, store energy, or monitor the wearer’s health. These high-tech offerings hope to change the game for the industry.

The project represents a new frontier for the Internet of Things. IOT describes putting sensors and computing in all manner of physical objects — jet engines, power generators, cars, farm equipment and thermostats, among others — to measure and monitor everything from machines in need of repair to traffic patterns.The products of this emerging apparel field are being called “functional fabrics,” “connected fabrics,” “textile devices” and “smart garments.”

As we note in Chapter 1, OM requires contributions from many disciplines. Functional fabrics embodies the material sciences, electrical engineering, software development, human-computer interaction, advanced manufacturing and fashion design. Clothes filled with sensors and chips could give new meaning to the term wearables, now mainly wristbound digital devices like a fitness monitor or an Apple Watch.

Creating jobs, as well as technology, will be a measure of the project’s success or failure. Its goal is to reverse the steady erosion of textile jobs in the United States and generate more than 50,000 jobs in 10 years across a range of industries. “This is about reimagining what a fabric is, and rebirthing textiles into a high-tech industry,” says MIT’s professor leading the project.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. In what other industries do we see technology creating manufacturing jobs earlier lost to Asia?
  2. Why is the Defense Department leading this effort?

OM in the News: Textile Plants Humming Once Again in the Carolinas

The old textile mills in the Carolinas are mostly gone now. Gaffney Manufacturing, National Textiles, Cherokee — clangorous, dusty, productive engines of the Carolinas fabric trade — fell one by one to the forces of globalization. Just as the Carolinas benefited when manufacturing migrated first from England to New England and then to here, where labor was even cheaper, they suffered in the 1990s when the textile industry mostly left the US. It headed to China, India, Mexico — wherever people would spool, spin and sew for a few dollars or less a day.

But remarkably, Parkdale Mills, the country’s largest buyer of raw cotton, has reopened and is thriving–another indication of the resurgence of US manufacturing, reports The New York Times (Sept. 20, 2013) in its cover story. For example, just last year, clothing maker American Giant was buying fabric from a factory in India. Now, it is cheaper to shop in the US, using Parkdale yarn.

American manufacturing has several advantages over outsourcing. Transportation costs are a fraction of what they are overseas. Turnaround time is quicker. Most striking, labor costs aren’t that much higher than overseas because the factories that survived the outsourcing wave have turned to automation and are employing far fewer workers. Further, monitoring worker safety in places like Bangladesh, has become a huge challenge.

In 2012, textile exports were $22.7 billion, up 37% from just 3 years earlier. That the industry is thriving again is indicative of a broader reassessment by companies about manufacturing in the US. A recent M.I.T. survey found that 1/3 of American companies with manufacturing overseas said they were considering backsourcing some production, while 15% said they had already decided to do so. This means jobs–but on nowhere near the scale there was before, because machines have replaced humans at almost every point in the production process. Take Parkdale: The mill produces 2.5 million pounds of yarn a week with about 140 workers. In 1980, that production level would have required more than 2,000 people.

Classroom discussion questions:

1. What are the reasons Parkdale is thriving?

2. What is the role of automation in the return of manufacturing to the US?

OM in the News: Obama vs. ATMs and Technology vs. Jobs

In headlines last week, President Obama linked technology to job losses when he stated:  “There are some structural issues with our economy where a lot of businesses have learned to become more efficient with a lot fewer workers. You see it when you go to a bank and you use an ATM, you don’t go to a bank teller”. The Wall Street Journal (June 22,2100), however, says: “We usually call it progress. It isn’t exactly a new phenomenon. Businesses relentlessly look for ways to replace workers with machines”.

It’s true that telephone operators lost jobs to automated switching, toll collectors are being replaced by E-Z Pass, and that auto workers lose jobs to robots. The Journal gives 2 great examples of productivity increases that benefit society with lower priced goods. The 1st is the textile industry where 50 years ago, one N. Carolina worker operated 5 machines at once, each running a thread through a loom 100 times a minute. Now machines run 6 times as fast, and one worker overseas 100 of them. That’s a 120 fold increase in productivity!

The 2nd example is how 2 workers can now manage an egg laying operation of 1 million chickens laying 240 million eggs a year. The two keep an eye on the highly-mechanized, computerized process that no one could even imagine 50 years ago.

 The result of such productivity gains is a higher standard of living for all of us, in which we work fewer hours to afford enough money to buy  a dozen eggs, a flat-screen TV, or new shoes. Our blog a few months ago discusses why productivity increases are such a plus to society.

Discussion questions:

1. How do new jobs get created to replace the old ones?

2. Why do productivity increase help our society?