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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview
I-0081, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern
Historical Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill”
Robert Sidney Smith, president and CEO of the National Association of Hosiery Manufacturers, discusses the hosiery industry in North Carolina and the U.S., delving into its history, present challenges, and future. Smith describes the minutiae of hosiery business, such as the development of new techniques and technologies, as well as stepping back to evaluate the place of U.S. hosiery manufacturers in the world market and the increasing need to market products as well as produce them.
Robert Sidney Smith, president and CEO of the National Association of Hosiery Manufacturers, discusses the hosiery industry in North Carolina and the U.S.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
Interview with Sid Smith for the Southern Oral History Program's the North Carolina Business History Series. The date is Monday, January 25, 1999. We're at the offices of the National Association of Hosiery Manufacturers in Charlotte, North Carolina. My name is Joe Mosnier of the Southern Oral History Program. This is cassette 1.25.99-SS. Mr. Smith's full name is Robert Sidney Smith. Let me start by asking you to sketch out your place of birth, family, what your folks did, early education, [etc.].
Well, I was born and raised right here in Charlotte. My father worked
for Duke Power Company, the electrical power generator here. He was the
head of their claim department. I am the product of a second family for
him, so he was quite much older than I was and passed away at age
seventy-six. I was only nineteen when he passed away. My mother had been
a schoolteacher and was a homemaker after they got married. I went
through the Charlotte Public School System and then went to college in
Spartanburg, South Carolina. I went to Wofford College. I guess the
first big prominent name I saw on a lot of the big buildings down there
and the name one begins to hear if you're a Wofford student is
"Milliken," with their corporate headquarters in
Spartanburg. They were very gracious to Wofford College. That was kind
of my first introduction to a textile operation, the exposure that I had
to the Milliken operation by going to college in Spartanburg, going to
Wofford. I had signed up while in college for the Marine Corps and had
indicated that I was going to go to Officer's Candidate School after
graduating. It was my full intention and desire to be a full career
military officer. That was my plan. I did a double major, one in
economics and another one in business administration. So, I had a double
major and no minor and headed off into the Marine Corps. Went through
Let me stop you there before we turn to the—. We're interested in leadership themes as well, so that will motivate a few of these questions. What's your sense of the factors most responsible for your values formation? Would you point to your parents, as most people do, community leaders growing up?
The initial values were certainly installed by both parents. They were very strong influences in my life. Again, with my father being so much older than I was, his value system was based in an era that most people my age weren't exposed to. Being born in the late 1800s, his values had late-1800 values and he transferred those on to me. Plus, he was an outdoorsman, physical et cetera, so he imparted those. My mother on the other side was the epitome of grace, culture, class, the right knife, fork and spoon, Emily Post and all that. So I got those two kinds of things imposed upon me. They kind of became ingrained early on. Both parents were also very religious, and so I was brought up in the church. I think that was another good foundation. Like most kids growing up, you know you're exposed to church, but it doesn't kick in until later on in life. When the time came that I really needed to rely on religious and spiritual things, the foundation was there.
Baptist church?
Presbyterian.
Presbyterian.
So, that was there. Then the Marine Corps I think galvanized all of it, particularly Officers Candidate School, recruit training. That really kind of tied everything together in a real strong organizational content for knowing who you are, and then having confidence in yourself, and then being in a position to hopefully be a leader. That's certainly what the Marine Corps imparted.
What was your reason for selecting economics and business administration in college? How did you make your choice about which way to go in [your] studies?
Probably like most kids when I went to college, I didn't have any idea what I wanted to do. I knew that I was not going to be a "professional" lawyer, doctor, et cetera. I also was not the strongest student and I zeroed in on what I thought would be practical [and] that would stand the test of time. There are an awful lot of good majors. There are people that major in a lot of different things and then go on in varying careers in life. I picked one that I thought was practical. Maybe that's parental influence or whatever, but that's why I zeroed in on business. I didn't have any interest too much in the sciences, chemistry. Also [I] was a long way from a math whiz. I knew I did not want to do accounting, so I went for the practical business— what might hold me up if I needed it. I loved economics. Still do today. In fact, even today in my reading habits, I don't read fiction. I'll read textbooks and history books. That's my relaxing, my enjoyment.
Tell me about your decision to sign up for the Marine Corps. That would've happened—. If it happened mid-college, then it's right as Vietnam was just really starting to pop up onto the level of awareness.
I signed on the dotted line, so to speak, when I was about eighteen, my freshman year in college. There was a Marine Corps recruiter there. Even through my high school days, and probably back even in my childhood, I had been pretty enamored with military. I liked it. It was attractive to me. While we lived in town, we owned a farm out side of town, about a hundred and eighty acres about halfway between Charlotte and Gastonia. As I said, my father being an outdoorsman, he taught me guns, rifles, shooting. I could probably shoot as well as I could walk by the time I learned to walk. We would go hunting and we would stay out all night hunting. I really was enamored with that. My father was in the military in World War One, and then I had two half brothers from his first marriage that both fought in World War Two. I grew up with a lot of the war stories and experiences. Then, riflery and being outdoors, that's kind of what attracted me to the military in the beginning. So, when the opportunity came up, I was very attracted to the Marine Corps and when the opportunity was there, I signed up.
Was your experience in Vietnam one that in any substantial fashion altered the course of your sense of yourself, your sense of what you might want to do in the world? Did that have that sort of impact on you or did you entered and come out essentially the same person?
No, it definitely changed me. I don't think anybody can say
that—. Even just going through the Marine Corps in peacetime,
you're going to come out a different person. But to go through the
Marine Corps and combat at the same time, you're going to be altered.
There's no doubt about that. We've all heard the horror stories of
Vietnam Vets. I think a lot of them are excuses and crutches that people
stand on, but there's also some reality to some of them too. I was an
infantry officer. I was in combat every single
Sure. Tell me about what led you back to Charlotte and this organization.
Well again, I got wounded and left the Marine Corps. When you do that,
where do you go? Well, you go home. [Laughter]
Let me ask at that juncture, how big was the organization? What was the staffing level of the Association and so forth? What kind of group were you joining?
Well that was January, 1972. That was twenty-seven years ago now. The staff was approximately fifteen, sixteen people. Five of those were in the statistical department alone. They were doing everything statistically by hand: posting numbers, adding up columns of numbers, et cetera. The first thing that I did was to take those numbers and put them in a format that they could be computerized because this new wizard machine called a computer was now coming up. Most computer activities, unless you were a big corporation and could have a computer department, which took a room with a big machine standing in it—. Most of the businesses, the medium and small business, used an outsourcing service like a computer center. So what I did was I had found the right computer center and I computerized our statistics and cut those five people back to two, me and one other. That went over very well. To add to the statistics and do different things that none of them had ever done before really was kind of the beginning of, "Hey, maybe this guy will work out."
What was the typical project? What would you have gone out to try to put some numbers together on?
Well, the typical project was to do how much was produced and shipped by all the mills each month and they would send in the reports.
On a monthly basis?
On a monthly basis. That's all they'd ever done. They would also do a
wage survey twice a year. That's all they had done. What I did
differently was on several occasions, I took the macroeconomic
indicators published by the government and took them, our industry data,
and compared it to bigger sectors of the industry and then the economy
as a whole. So, [I] could give a reference of what was going on not just
in our own little world, but how it matches up with what's going on on a
macroeconomic area. So, that was one project. The other key thing that
happened I think was that we had some issues crop up in Washington in
the lobbying area. The Association had done typical association
lobbying, but one of the big issues in 1972 was the cotton dust standard
was implemented by OSHA. Controlling cotton dust, which causes
byssinosis, is important. We should do that. But, like most government
agencies when they react, they just throw out a big net and cover
everybody whether it's practical or impractical, needed or not needed.
So, the knitting industry with hosiery specifically, we started lobbying
that one, we don't have a byssinosis problem in our industry. We don't
have brown lung problems in our industry, therefore, why add millions of
dollars to operating costs and therefore, costs to the end consumer in
the product? We started lobbying on that [issue]. I had the facts. I
could prove things in the presentations using numbers. Washington
lobbying was changing about that time in that it was moving from the
emotional to the factual. What I was able to do was to take the Hosiery
Association's positions and arguments and present them in a factual kind
of way rather than just going up there like most industries were doing,
"Don't do this to us." Like basic textiles
protectionism against imports: "Just don't do that."
But, that's it. It was an emotional argument. I began to move our
presentations into the factual. I think that was another key element of
why they then
Can you sketch the character of those lobbying meetings up in DC— who you would've met with and folks in OSHA?
Well, there's all kinds of lobbying. The legislator, the Congress if you
will, passes laws which are kind of vague. What they do is grant
authority to regulatory agencies to come up with final rules and
regulations. So, your lobbying is different depending on who you're
talking to. If you're lobbying for or against a particular piece of
legislation, you will talk to congressman and senators, but more likely
their aides that are in charge of that particular subject. In the
regulatory agency you find the department and then the person or persons
that are working on the writing portion. So, you are lobbying after the
fact of the law being passed to frame or shape the final rules and
regulations that are published. So using the cotton dust standard as an
example again, we found the right person in OSHA who was working on the
writing of that standard. They were quite skeptical. They had been given
facts and figures and all these problems with people having health
problems. The labor unions were living with them about we have to be as
tight as we can. Again, nobody wants anybody to have brown lung. It's an
awful disease. We don't want that. If it needed to be controlled in some
situations, good. Let's control it. We made that argument. What we were
trying to show is that is it is wasteful of national economic resources
to try to impose it where it's not needed. So, that's kind of how we
were presenting our argument and showing it in costs, in the
manufacturing
About what year did the cotton dust issue get resolved?
It started in 1972 and was resolved eight years later in 1980.
That much time?
That is another thing that one probably learned and picked up from my background, is patience. You're not going to get a quick answer in everything. You have to have the stick to-it-edness to hang tough through a long haul of trying to get people convinced that what you're doing is sincere. It is honest. You're not misleading them. I think that's one of the things right from the get go that I tried to impart in our Hosiery Association's input in Washington, D.C., is reliability. We're not going to mislead you. We're going to give you the facts, good and bad. We're simply here to make our case. We're not in enmity with you. We're just here. I think over the years on this case and a lot of the others, what we did was build up a certain amount of, "You know what? We can trust those guys. They're not trying to pull wool over our eyes. They're not lying to us. They're here presenting just straight information. We can rely on them." Now we fight real hard to save that and protect that.
Any members of the North Carolina delegation who sort of stick out in your memory as especially helpful to the cause or helped get you access? Did you have much contact with any members in particular that you remember?
Not back in the '70s. Again, that was a regulatory impact. I didn't really rely that much at that point in time on state representatives.
Oh, no. I meant members of the Congress from North Carolina.
Right. I don't remember specifically working with any of them on this particular regulatory agency. And let's remember, just because the Association is located in North Carolina, we don't just rely on North Carolina congressmen and senators.
Sure.
We are a national organization. There are manufacturing facilities in about thirty states. So, we rely on our constituency relationships anywhere we have mill and hosiery operations. We will call on our friends in Pennsylvania and Alabama and Tennessee, just as readily and quickly as we would call on them from North Carolina.
I know you've prepared written pieces in various places that talk about the longer history of the association and so forth. Can you sketch the most salient parts of the trajectory of the Association across the last several decades? What course of the fortunes of the Association—
It was formed in 1905 by a group of national, large companies in the
hosiery industry. They could see, looking at other industries, that
there were some industries that had coalesced together starting in the
late 1800s in manufacturing trade organizations to represent the
interests of that industry. In textiles and apparel there were some
organizations that came before 1905 and there were some that came after
1905. It cropped up in a very fertile era for the development of
industry groups. When they first started, it was run day to day by
active mill owners, out of their own offices. There was no staff. There
was no home headquarters or anything. If my recollection is correct, the
first secretary, if you will, to the organization was a mill owner in
Tennessee. Then it was transferred to and set up with a full-time
headquarters and a full-time paid staff in
So, it meets both the marketing and the technology introduction needs? It accomplishes both of those purposes.
That's correct.
In '79, you said? So you've seen that process through from the very beginning.
Yes. In fact, one of my added on duties was to get that show started
when we were leaving in '79 and I was involved. About that same period
of time my predecessor, whose name was Sam Berry, and he was the one
that was here when I was hired—. By then, I was the executive
vice president and there was another vice president.
Worth mentioning any sort of ebbing and flowing to the membership level in the organization? [The membership] always has been, remains the principle industry trade group, obviously. Any substantial shifts of that sort?
I guess the peak activity of the Association— as was probably true with a tremendous number of other industry groups— was World War Two, because everything in this country went onto war production, including hosiery and socks. Nylon was taken away, so ladies' hosiery you had to go back to silk and cotton. Producing and operating under the War Board instructions, rules, regulations, it necessitated an organization that could be a conduit for information between the industry and government. They needed each other. The industry had to have a group they could turn to to say, "What does this mean? What do I have to do today for the war effort?" I would say that was probably the high water mark for the Association and for every association. Since my joining in 1972, which was my first introduction— and I think probably from the high watermark of World War Two— the trend line has been constantly one of fewer companies, consolidation in the industry. When I joined the industry in 1972, there were probably 600 companies in the business. Today there are 300. I would say if you look back to World War Two, there were 1100. So, it's been consolidation. Now at the same point in time, actual output production in units and sales and dollars has gone the other way. They've gone up. So, it is a consolidating into the hands of bigger groups and bigger organizations.
Looking back across this historical landscape, what have been the most important parts of the story in terms of the broad fortunes of the hosiery industry post war period, thinking of specific periods of import challenges, technological innovations, regulatory developments?
Looking at the product area I think is probably the critical one. We
have to remember that hosiery is really two industry, two sectors. I
like to describe them as being
Meaning that a customer, a woman, might identify and go out and select a L'eggs brand stocking—.
A national brand. That's right.
But in the sock market people still are less brand conscious.
They'll buy store brand. The companies haven't put the money behind the
development of a national brand. Now, there are strong examples contrary
to that. There's some tremendous and wonderful sock brands out there,
but they just didn't make up the same percentage of the total industry
as was true over in sheers. The big thing that changed for socks which
started kicking in in the '70s and 80s was we began to develop and
market socks for specific end uses. There was a time in a man's
wardrobe, or anybody's wardrobe, you had only two or three kinds of
socks, blue, black and brown. You wore them for everything. Then, there
was the athletic sock that was specific. Then, we came out with casual
socks that were somewhere in between athletic and dress. Then, we
started even sub-categorizing, like within the athletic group there are
socks designed for basketball, socks designed for jogging, socks
designed for bicycle riding. They are engineered for the needs of that
particular activity. So, we began a real marketing oriented thrust in
socks, and that certainly raised the per capita consumption and the
interest in the sock market. I think that was a major factor in the run
up, if you will, of the production and sales and popularity of socks.
The two biggest things that we're probably in the middle of right now is
a fashion cycle, the "casual look." Casual has
certainly impacted on the frequency and wear use of ladies' sheer
hosiery and has shifted
You mean Wal-Mart, Target?
Correct. If you look back in the '50s and even '60s, department
stores— traditional neighborhood or national chains department
stores—were the predominant way that the consumer bought their
goods. They were located usually in downtown locations. I think one of
the critical elements there was that manufacturers could make a decision
of who in a particular locale would carry their products and then limit
that distribution. They could pick a particular department store and
say, "Okay, I'm going to sell my brand or my products through
you. I'm not going to sell them to anybody else in your neighborhood or
in your city." They could do that. They could also set what the
retail price was, and they could hold the retailer, the department store
to that. If the retailer didn't abide by it, then they lost their
license to carry it and they could shift to somebody else. That kept
pricing and channels of distribution controlled in the hands of the
manufacturer and/or the selling agent and/or the distributor that had
that line. That was true of all apparel, not just hosiery and of a lot
of other products too. But there was a
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
This is side B of the first cassette with Sid Smith in Charlotte on January 25, 1999.
To reiterate, the amount of sheer hosiery sales through discount is thirty-three, thirty-five percent. Whereas in the sock category, it's sixty, sixty-five percent. In both cases, it is still the largest channel of distribution. That is a tremendous shift from when the majority of all sock sales and the largest channel of distribution, even of ladies' goods, was through other channels— either department stores or for ladies' hosiery, grocery stores. So, that's been a big change.
I imagine that translated into downward price pressure at the wholesale level.
Yes. This country is going through deflation, as most economists have
pointed out. The consumer price index increases have been very low. We
have not had inflation for quite a few years. Bill Clinton gets no
credit for it. It's the discounters. They are driving the retail
economy. They are the market force to deal with. They deal in volume and
they deal in price. At the same time, they demand quality too. So, the
manufacturers are squeezed to produce high quality on one side, but do
it fast, do it quick and do it at a very competitive price. There are a
couple of other things probably that we ought to talk about in
historical developments. They relate to pantyhose only and not the whole
hosiery industry. With pantyhose being a very large product category,
[one development] is the advent of the shift of selling pantyhose in the
grocery store from the department stores. In '65, when Twiggy stepped
out on that runway, most hosiery— including this new product
"pantyhose"— was sold in the department
store. That's where women went to buy their goods. One of the biggest
manufacturers at that time, if not the
Discount stores.
We're seeing that shift over to discount stores. Just in the last year or two, discount has taken the final one or two percentage points it needed to get higher than groceries. It has done that.
You haven't mentioned technology. Any important—. Obviously there are technological aspects say to the development of just the right machines to make pantyhose all in one unit and so forth. You mentioned nylon. You mentioned the crimping that allowed for elasticity. Are those the principle things there or are there other more recent [developments] say in fibers or in—
Knitting technology.
Speed and quality?
There've been several. If you go all the way back to the turn of the
century—. We have to be careful what we say now, we mean the
last century, back to 1900. If you go back to the turn of the century,
most hosiery was still knitted on a flat bed knitting machine. It was
still knitted fabric but it was flat. You would take a pattern for
hosiery whether it would be socks or ladies' stockings. You would lay
that pattern down just like you would for a shirt pattern. You would cut
around and you would roll it over and you would seam it and that was
what created the seam in the back, called fully fashioned or full
fashioned or seamed hosiery. That's why the seam was there. You had to
sew it. By the mid-1920s and '30s, technology had come to where we could
knit in a circular tube or seamless cane. The majority of the industry
had made the switchover to seamless or
Which would have been about—?
First introductions could have been as early as the late '60s, early
'70s. To acquire machines and get large banks of them up and running
probably was not until the '80s and now the '90s. It did a couple of
things, but there's a step in the middle. If you had just a basic
circular knitting machine, it was a mechanical entity. It had chain
drives and cogs, and the chain would move, and the cog would hit the
bottom of the needle and make it jump up, and it was totally mechanical.
The next step was to put in electronics in place of mechanical. The next
biggest technological change was to put electrodes in place of a lot of
mechanical cogs so that electronic circuitry could drive things. That
increased speed. We could now drive these machines much faster. In the
1970s and into the '80s, very roughly and the technical people in the
industry would be better at this than I am, but approximately the
circular knitting speed for a pair of ladies' sheer hosiery jumped from
300 revolutions to 1200 revolutions because of electronics. Once you got
electronics in place, the next attachment is computer control. Now
computer control has kicked in in the last ten to fifteen years, which
would put us into the mid-'80s and of course on into the '90s. When you
had a mechanical machine, to change the pattern or change the product
that that machine made, you had to physically tear the machine down. You
had to have a mechanic with a pair of pliers and a screwdriver that
would take the machine and tear it down, reconfigure the cogs and the
chains, put it all back together and start it over. It generally took
eight hours to change over a machine. So, if you had a hundred machines
in your plant, you took 800 man-hours to change a style. Guess what?
All come to the fore.
It's made the industry more responsive.
How capital intensive was the computerization phase? Did this represent the replacement of one generation of plant equipment with another – say, between the '60s and the '90s?
Yeah. There is a phase in there that one could—. If the
mechanical machine had electronics to it, you could kind of do an add on
the computer. But the computer really could not initiate changing
functions that well as an adaptation. Maybe you could track what was
being produced through a computer, but you really couldn't make pattern
You've begun to hint at it there. Can you take a few minutes and describe the broad character of the consolidation on both sides, [the] factors most responsible [and] the character of the entities emerging from—?
Let's talk about the sheer business first. Remember, we've got to deal
with them like two sectors. There were several hundred sheer hosiery
manufacturers in the United States— probably three, four, five
hundred— back after World War Two. They were making stockings.
But, it was that advent of the switch over from stockings to pantyhose
in 1965 through '70. It was a guessing game. Is this a fad or do I go
into this? Do I start making these pantyhose or are stockings going to
come back? There are people that guessed both ways. There are people
that said, "No. I'm going to keep making stockings."
Of course, stocking sales were going down. Pantyhose sales were going
up.
Who was that?
It was a company called Schulte-Diekoff out of Germany. Their family is
still in business today here in America, as one of our companies. They
began to enter the marketplace with very competitive prices. Many of the
American family owned pantyhose companies said, "We're not
going to give this away. We're going to go down
This happened right about when?
About 1970. It's the beginnings of it— '70, '71, '72 was when we were going through it
So people were having a tough time.
Then fashion changed. It changed away from the mini-skirt about 1971, '72. It didn't go back to a skirt. Remember this is Vietnam. This is the hippie era. It went to jeans. We went to pants, which is the antithesis of what hosiery needs in a fashion. That market just slammed to a stop. In 1972, when I joined the Association, over one hundred women's sheer hosiery companies shut down in the first twelve months that I had come to work here. I started going, "What in the heck have I got myself into?" So, it was a very compacted, very ruthless consolidation. But, there were about fifty or sixty companies left in ladies' sheer hosiery. Now that consolidation from 1972 until 1999 has continued, but it has been tapered. The companies that were left then and that are left now are bigger; they are stronger; they are more technologically advanced. They've got excellent management teams. They've got a handle on national branding. They are competitive on a worldwide basis.
Fair to say generally a trend away from family owned and controlled to corporate owned and publicly financed and so forth or not so much?
Yes, that has occurred. Though, there are still a number of family owned entities in the sheer business that have good size to them. Today—from the 1972 era where we had about sixty of them— we're down to about twenty or twenty-five women's sheer hosiery companies. But even out of that, you could probably count on one or two hands, the principle players, that have the lion's share of the business. There are still some people that make specialty products or niches and things, and they'll always be there. Let's start over on socks.
Can we take a quick break for just a moment?
Sure. [break] I think we were going to start on the same trend line for
socks. Socks, there were probably five or six hundred companies in the
sock business when I joined the Association. Certainly there was right
after World War Two. Socks have been always different than sheers. It is
unique in many ways. There are more styles and more sizes and more
colors in socks and more patterns in socks than there are in ladies'
hosiery. There always have been. A lot of people don't realize that or
think about it, but ladies' hosiery really doesn't come in that many
colors. But socks do. It is that degree of differentiation that has been
able to support more entities. Everybody has got something a little
different. It is that diversity that has maintained a fairly large group
of companies. Now, manufacturing technology has changed both in speed
and in computerization and in pattern changes. Companies have made the
capital investments to get into the equipment, which means that the ones
that have made that capital investment have been more competitive. But,
that really didn't matter up until the real emergence of discounters,
when price was the competitive factor. If you can't continue to compete
on price, you are really up against it. We have been
predicting— everybody in the industry has been
Tell me about the challenge— across this span again, backing up and taking the broad sweep of time again— presented over time by imports in hosiery.
Other than the specific period that I mentioned earlier, about a
particular foreign manufacturer trying to buy their way into the
pantyhose market, if you will, and pantyhose imports only got as high as
ten percent— that was high enough to change the
Because the quota went on unit volume, I guess?
Some of them do. Every one of them is different. I'm just using a
situation, that if you did have a limitation, you'd rather use it with
big-ticket items versus a small ticket item. That was a natural
protection. Second of all, through this automation that I talked
about— higher speeds and then computerization— we've
been able to get our manufacturing costs down, and particularly the
labor portion of it down. Labor is somewhere between seventeen and
eighteen percent on the bottom side to twenty-three to twenty-five
percent on the topside. Well, if you've got twenty percent labor in a
two dollar product and you save half your labor costs by going to a low
wage country, you ain't saved a whole lot. I say that for emphasis not
for poor grammar. You've haven't saved much. Then, you add on the
transportation costs and the insurance, you've more than made that up by
the time it gets here. The third thing is, retailers over this period of
time want us to carry the inventory. They don't want any inventory. But,
when they want those goods, you ship it. So, with "just in time
delivery," electronic data interchange, all of those kinds of
linkages with our retailers, our mills generally— whether it's
socks or
What was the Association's position on NAFTA?
Let me go back to our Association's position on all our international
trade. Back in 1972, the entire textile and apparel complex was totally
protectionist. It was what I always termed knee-jerk protectionism. When
I took over in '82 or '83 as the CEO, I remember for that whole ten year
period in between, almost every board meeting was a discussion on our
position on some international trade treaty or protectionism or
whatever. We generally— by majority vote, not
unanimously—voted to hang with the textile and apparel complex
and back their positions on being protectionist oriented. Keep them out
at any cost. We began to see some market opportunities overseas through
exports for our products. We began to see some of the inefficiencies
that we were being subjected to from who we were buying from that, we've
got great cotton here in the United States. We've got great cotton
spinning, but I wonder what price we could get from Pakistan on our raw
materials? I wonder what quality we could get? Are we doing ourselves a
favor to keep ourselves limited and our friends in the textile industry
certainly would like to keep us limited. We don't want to buy overseas.
We want to buy domestic, but we also want to make sure we're
getting—. Remember this economic environment we're operating
in, we're going to have to source our goods where we can get them at the
I didn't realize that pantyhose today came off the machine in two different cylinders and had to be sewn.
That may be the next step. But, that 9802 proviso said that you can cut
it and you can sew it, but if you do anything else to it— if
you die it or bleach it or package it— you lose your right to
claim 9802. You can't claim it. You have to pay full duty. So, the
Did you lose members over the issue?
Not to my specific knowledge that somebody called up and said,
"Because of your stance we're quitting." No, because
we were doing a lot of other things too. It
Trace if you would for me the evolution of labor relations and the whole union question and the hosiery side of textiles. Has that been an issue that you've had to spend much of your professional time during your tenure attending to in any shape or fashion?
No, because the hosiery is basically a very low percentage of unionized. It's less than [a] ten percent unionized labor force. Of course, [it is] probably around five percent, if not below. We really have to jump way back in history, just briefly. If you go back to the middle 1800s, the hosiery and the textiles were based in New England and the primary raw material was cotton. The Civil War came around and that textile industry, including hosiery, was cut off from cotton. They had to source cotton from Europe and Asia and other places. They vowed, never again. If you study your history books, there were a lot of people that even after the armistice—.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
This is the second cassette in the January 25, 1999 interview with Mr. Sid Smith of the National Association of Hosiery Manufacturers. We are in the Charlotte, North Carolina, headquarters of the Association and this is the second cassette interview; so, it is tape number 1.25.99-SS.2.
Again, even after the Armistice was signed of the Civil War, a lot of people weren't sure it was going to remain peaceful. It could all spring up again. The textile interests up in the northeast vowed never again would they be cut off from cotton. Many of them began to move south to get close to their raw materials. Land was cheap. They were even able to come in and buy some of those old places. [They] even began to move down the spinning [manufacturing from the north]. They put the spinning mills right at the edge of the cotton field. So, it was a close proximity. That transition carried on into the 1900s. The deteriorating labor market in the northeast continued to move everything down south. By the mid century, 1950s, the core of t