Plant closings renew Senate jobs debate

US Senate Democratic Candidate Inez Tenenbaum, left, autographs one of her campaign signs Friday for Ed Bell outside the Delta Woodside Estes Plant in Piedmont, as other emplyees look on. Bell has worked at the plant for twenty five years, but will lose his job later this year when the plant closes. e-mail this story

With 359 others, they learned this week that their jobs of 25 and 30 years, respectively, at Delta Woodside's plant here will disappear before Thanksgiving.

Friday morning, Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Inez Tenenbaum stood outside the modern plant to offer condolences, blame and hope as she enters the final 10 days of her increasingly tight race with Republican Jim DeMint.

Bell was buying, Williams was open.

For Bell, at 54, the future is uncertain.

"Like everybody else, I guess, I'll go to school, try to get some education and get some of those high-tech jobs they're going to give us," Bell laughs, but it's tinged with skepticism.

"Yes, sir," Bell said, he holds DeMint responsible, "because he sold out our jobs, the only job some of us ever had."

Moments earlier, Tenenbaum had laid the blame at DeMint's feet.

"Time and time again, when your jobs were on the line, Jim DeMint waved the white flag and nearly volunteered your jobs to other countries," she said.

The closings are a tragedy, DeMint said in a telephone interview from Beaufort, but "it's shameful for her to try to turn it into a political gimmick, to suggest that her policies could keep those jobs in the U.S."

Williams isn't certain whom he'll vote for or whom he blames for textiles' woes, but he knows "it's been coming for many years, but NAFTA was the straw that broke the camel's back."

Unlike Bell, Williams, at 63 has a fallback position when his drawing machine job ends: He can put in for retirement, then help his wife with her day care-center. Maybe there'll be more time as a Boy Scout leader, too.

After hearing Tenenbaum say she would stand up for South Carolina's jobs and fight unfair trade agreements, Bell remained unsold.

"I haven't been able to make up my mind, I told Mrs. Tenenbaum that," he said.

Improved trade through better future agreements and enforcement of existing ones, is the key to saving existing jobs and developing new and better ones, DeMint said.

"The fact is that companies are telling me that unless we can expand markets for the cloth that's woven in this country, we won't be able to keep the textile mills we've got," he said.

While the clock can't be turned back on the erosion of textile jobs, DeMint said improved trade agreements, tax reform, barring frivolous lawsuits and improved education will "develop the workforce that can take the jobs coming to South Carolina."

DeMint said he would work to assure extended unemployment benefits, job retraining funds and company-provided personnel services to the displaced workers.

Tenenbaum is in her second term as state education superintendent; DeMint is a third-term U.S. House member from Greenville. Both are 53. They are seeking the seat of retiring 38-year veteran Democrat Ernest F. Hollings of Charleston.

After two months of hammering DeMint on tax reform, Tenenbaum shifted the debate back this week to where it started, jobs and trade.

The catalyst was the latest spate of plant closings, with 693 jobs lost in Clemson, Walhalla and Piedmont.

Where Tenenbaum has sharply criticized international trade agreements as an invitation to unscrupulous foreign competitors to cheat, DeMint has said the pacts, with adequate safeguards, are opening the doors to new markets and foreign investment bringing high-paying jobs to the state.

Friday, she told 30 Delta Woodside employees in the plant's parking lot, "You are what my campaign is all about; it's about helping you out and giving you hope that someone in Washington is looking out for you, cares whether or not you have a job."

Tenenbaum said "that's the kind of leader Fritz Hollings has been, it's the kind of leader (Republican Sen.) Lindsey Graham has been, but I regret to say, that has not been the kind of leader Jim DeMint has been."

She criticized DeMint for casting the deciding vote on fast-track trade negotiating authority for the White House and failing to join his Carolinas colleagues in pushing for an extension of textile quotas on Chinese goods due to end this year.

DeMint has said he's working quietly with the administration to develop safeguards against unfair competition.

After campaigning Thursday with Graham, DeMint was joined Friday by Georgia Sen. Saxbe Chambliss for stops in Beaufort, West Columbia and North Augusta.

Chambliss continued DeMint's Thursday theme that he would be a senator who could add to the GOP majority and possibly break Democratic filibusters of the nominations of conservative, strict constructions to the federal judiciary.

DeMint also surrounded himself with the state's top two Republicans, Graham and Gov. Mark Sanford, in a new television spot in which the pair ask viewers to look beyond negative attacks to DeMint's leadership in opposing tax increases and reforming government.

Also, DeMint spokeswoman Kara Borie said his congressional office is working with Delta Woodside to use Trade Adjustment Assistance funds for retraining and unemployment benefits for the workers. The funds will be drawn from $13 million in National Emergency grants DeMint helped the state Employment Security Commission obtain recently, she said.

Dan Hoover covers politics and can be reached at 298-4883.