Textile Industry

The House failed to override President Bush's veto of legislation to protect the textile and shoe industries from imports. The 275-152 tally, which fell 12 votes short of the two-thirds necessary to overturn the veto, kills the bill for the year. The Bush Administration said the bill, if enacted into law, would undermine the global trade liberalization talks scheduled to be completed this year.

The machine operators lean back lazily on rolls of cotton fabric, shooing flies from their sweat-soaked tunics as their boss, Abdul Latif, paces between rows of silent electric looms covered in lint. The textile plant owner knows it's just one of several rolling blackouts that will darken his plant today, as they have every day for four years. Along his street, other textile plants have either closed or begun selling their looms for scrap. Latif scrapes by, but the outages have cut his plant's output in half.

There was a time when the heat of machinery and smell of grease must have overwhelmed the 1,600 workers at the Ponemah Textile Mill, formerly the nation's largest mill under a single roof. * Where dozens of women and children once attended to the whirring carding machines, Tom Beaudet, 65, now stands alone, working with machines that roll raw wool into knitting yarn. From appearances, the Quinnehicut Woolen Co.

As whispers of protectionism began to unsettle the export-import business, Oriental Weavers, one of the world's largest carpet makers, reset its looms and recast its prices to compete in an increasingly bargain-conscious U.S. market. The Cairo-based company fared relatively well over an 18-month period as the U.S. housing crisis spread and oil prices soared. But its sales to America have since slipped, forcing it to look toward emerging markets in Asia and former Soviet republics.

Larisa Baranova comes to the gates of the March 8 Weaving Factory every day with her 3-year-old son and the desperate hope that maybe, just maybe, this time the plant will pay her the three months' salary it owes her. "So far, there's only silence," she said, swallowing tears. Silence, too, reigns in the eerie factory halls lined with top-grade weaving machines, now idled, draped in cloth and looking as if there are oversized corpses beneath.

Joe Robertson has come a long way since hawking bedspreads at Orange County flea markets in the 1970s. He now owns and operates a new $35-million textile plant that soon will be the largest of its kind in Baja California. His company, Huntington Beach-based Kojo Industries, is one of the hundreds of U.S.

If you take the nickel tour of Arnold Lorber's textile plant in Carson, bring a phrase book. Make that several. On the shop floor, Lorber chats with workers in staccato Spanish, one of nine languages he has mastered in 50-plus years in the textile trade. He introduces a visitor to his Russian computer expert, a German dyer and an Israeli plant manager. He then touches the keypad of a sophisticated fabric finishing machine programmed in four languages: English, Italian, German and Spanish.

Caribbean Jobs Lost to Mexico, Official Says: More than 100 companies that employed 60,000 people in the region have moved to Mexico since it signed a free-trade pact with the United States and Canada, a textile industry official said in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.

A day after winning major concessions from the Bush administration in their efforts to curb Chinese textile imports, American manufacturers began preparing for the next step -- including requests for import limits on several other products. Carolyn Hern, spokeswoman for Rep. Robin Hayes (R-N.C.), said the textile industry was expected this week to formally ask the government to curb the Chinese surge in as many as 11 other textile and clothing items.

House trade lawmakers, defying a presidential veto threat, today approved aid for the import-battered textile industry, and Democrats acted to speed work on sweeping export legislation. "President Reagan seems willing to preside over the de-industrialization of America," House Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O'Neill Jr. (D-Mass.) said after the Ways and Means subcommittee on trade acted on the textile bill. "We in Congress are not."

To see how Mexico's garment industry is stumbling against global competition, look no further than Textile City. This modern industrial park about 65 miles east of the capital was the nation's response to the growing challenge from Asia. The park's founders planned a specialized factory town similar to those in China, where manufacturers would cluster together.

The U.S. and China reached a tentative agreement Saturday to cap exports of Chinese clothing to the U.S. over the next three years, textile industry representatives for importers and producers said. The agreement raises the allowable U.S. import growth rate for Chinese pants, knit shirts, bras and other items to 10% in 2006 and to about 16% by 2008, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity. In return, U.S.

The Bush administration announced that it had accepted petitions from the U.S. textile industry to launch investigations into whether quotas should be imposed on 21 categories of clothing and textile imports from China. The decision further escalates a trade battle between the two nations and is expected to bring more pressure to bear on China to settle the disputes by reaching a comprehensive agreement covering clothing and textile trade to escape further quota cases.

The U.S. textile industry asked the Bush administration to extend emergency import curbs on billions of dollars' worth of clothing from China beyond 2005, industry representatives said. "The reason we need to do this is because China is refusing to negotiate seriously on a comprehensive bilateral" textile agreement, said Cass Johnson, president of the National Council of Textile Organizations.

The Bush administration, struggling to deal with America's surging trade deficit with China, announced Thursday that it would begin negotiations aimed at broad restrictions on imports of Chinese clothing and textiles. The news came as Beijing reported that China's cumulative trade surplus for the year rose to $50 billion in July, far exceeding the $32-billion surplus for all of 2004, as tighter credit and spending policies bit into the growth in imports.

China said Tuesday that it planned to launch a quota system to check its booming exports of textiles, a mechanism to help implement a deal reached with the European Union this month that eased trade friction. China canceled export quotas at the start of January as part of a global move to end textile quotas. But surges in textile and clothing exports upset the European Union and the United States, which sought to impose safeguards.

The Justice Department will appeal a federal court ruling that has blocked the Bush administration from considering textile industry requests for emergency restrictions on clothing imports from China, a department spokesman said. A quota system that had governed international textile trade for decades expired Jan. 1, raising fears China would sweep aside other suppliers. An international trade court injunction bars the government from considering U.S.

Two major groups representing the textile industry, which is highly sensitive to foreign competition, came out on opposing sides in the debate over a free-trade agreement with six Central American and Caribbean countries. The National Council of Textile Organizations announced its support for the Central American Free Trade Agreement, a decision that was hailed by the Bush administration.

Trade tensions between China and the European Union eased Friday as the two giants agreed to limit the Asian nation's surging textile exports. The accord, however, came amid new signs of growth in China's booming export juggernaut, which has sparked protectionist sentiments in Washington. China's trade surplus nearly doubled to $8.99 billion in May from $4.59 billion in April as exports outgrew imports, the Beijing government reported Friday.

China will raise export tariffs on 74 classes of clothing and textile products starting June 1, the Finance Ministry said today, a gesture that might help appease Western trading partners. Tariffs on most of those products would rise to 1 yuan (12.1 cents) per unit from 0.2 yuan, with the largest tariff per item at 4 yuan, the ministry said in a statement posted on its website. Products listed included trousers, T-shirts and underwear.