WATERVILLE, Maine -- Just a few weeks ago, the Hathaway girls switched off their sewing machines one last time, packed up their desk fans, and amid the unnatural quiet of a normally humming shirt factory, said wrenching goodbyes to the family of colleagues who had gone through marriages, childbirths, illnesses and divorces together.
One last time, they walked out of the hulking brick building by the Kennebec River that had made men's dress shirts since 1853 -- home to the nation's last major shirt manufacturing plant, made famous by the man-with-the-eye-patch logo, now among the latest victims of the manufacturing exodus to low-wage offshore markets.
Ripped from the place where many had first come to work as teen-agers, 240 Hathaway girls, as they call themselves, have been thrown into a harsh and unfamiliar world of computers, resumes and schooling for new careers, where part-time and seasonal jobs are the only hope at the moment and medical insurance is frighteningly out of reach.
Now, just possibly, comes Santa Claus. An Arizona developer, whose lawyer said he was gripped by patriotic urges, has offered to buy the city-owned building for $1.3 million in cash, reopen the shirt-making plant and rehire as many of the former Hathaway employees as possible. City officials are investigating the developer's financial proposal and seriously considering the deal.
"He has a very simple agenda," said Harold Pachios, the attorney for Scottsdale-area developer Michael J. Peloquin, who heard about the factory closing on television.
"He found out we don't make shirts in the United States anymore and it upset him, so he decided to buy this plant and equipment, and see if he could make a go of it with the right people, manufacturing shirts in the U.S.," said Pachios, of Portland, Maine.
C.F. Hathaway Co., the 165-year-old company that made shirts for the Union army during the Civil War, went on to set the standard for quality shirts sold off the rack. The brand outlasted two of its key competitors on American soil, Arrow and Van Heusen, whose labels live on -- as Hathaway's will -- but without the "Made in the USA" slogan.
The women who worked at the factory, in some cases three generations of a family simultaneously, took pride in the Hathaway label. And they took care of each other: When tragedy struck, workers on all four floors would plan a big spaghetti dinner, make crafts for a raffle and take collections for those in need.
A pattern repeated
Hathaway's departure from Waterville, a town of nearly 16,000 people, was not unexpected. For several years, its threatened collapse had inflicted slow torture on workers and a community accustomed to the shuttering of factories -- G.H. Bass, Cole Haan and Dexter shoes and Scott Paper among them.
It is a pattern repeated throughout the nation's textile industry, where competition from countries with cheap labor has contributed to the loss of 441,000 jobs in the past decade, a decline of 44 percent. Last year alone, 110 cloth-manufacturing and garment-making factories closed, most of them in the South.
Repeatedly given up for lost, the Hathaway factory was rescued five years ago when a local investment group financed a bailout and again a year ago when Windsong Allegiance Group, based in Westport, Conn., bought the company.
But six months later, in March, Windsong announced that it would shut the plant in June, blaming overseas competition. The company subsequently announced that it would keep producing Hathaway shirts as well as other types of clothing and products offshore. Windsong says it might even bring back the man-with-the-patch logo, which was discontinued several years back.
'All about cost'
Donald J. Sappington, Hathaway's president and chief executive officer, said quality and service aren't taken into account as they once were. "It's all about cost, the cheaper the better," he said, walking through the cavernous assembly room past row after row of quiet sewing machines almost begging for Ruby, Barbara, Dina, Regina and the others who sat at them.
"It's greed. That's what it all boils down to," said Wally Szumita, business agent in Biddeford, Maine, for the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees, or UNITE. "Take a hard look at Wal-Mart. They're controlling the country, dictating what you pay for everything."
Since Windsong's announcement last spring, hopes were raised -- then dashed anew -- as Wal-Mart extended a contract to keep the factory open on shortened hours, and the nonprofit Made in the USA Foundation, which works to retain American manufacturing, tried unsuccessfully to find investors.
The final blow came in September, when the factory lost out on an Air Force contract worth $18 million to $20 million that it needed to stay alive.
The layoffs came in October -- one department at a time until there was no work left: the patterns unit, cutting room, front unit, back unit, collars, cuffs, assembly and, finally, finishing, leaving the huge building with only 25 distribution workers (among them the plant's few male employees) until this month.
"I had to watch seven departments leave," said Veronica Vince, 36, a third-generation Hathaway girl who worked in finishing and whose mother, Rachelle, lost her job too. "It felt like a funeral that lasted two weeks."
UNITE leaders blamed free-trade agreements for this latest exodus of American jobs.
Others such as U.S. Rep. Peter Hoekstra, a Michigan Republican, held up Hathaway as a casualty of an out-of-control prison manufacturing system, in which low-wage inmates produced $150 million in clothing last year. Prison competition reduces the market available to private manufacturers, pitting them against each other in a desperate fight for survival.
While Hathaway had lost the Air Force contract to a private Kentucky company, Ashland Sales and Service Co./Macon Garment Inc., Sappington said, "The issue is that hundreds of millions of dollars in apparel business is going to prison inmates."
With a bigger piece of the pie, he argued, "both of us could have survived."
The prison issue, which hadn't come up in Waterville before the factory layoffs, was greeted as salt in the wound for Hathaway workers.
"I've worked all my life and brought up a family. I have a son in the Marine Corps, a son who's a state trooper and a daughter who works at the VA hospital. How much more American can you get?" said Kathy Pelletier, 56, who worked for Hathaway for 36 years and is the plant's union president.
"But now that I've lost my job, I have no health insurance. I can't take the [federally funded] retraining because I need a job that has health insurance," she said. "But if I was in prison, they'd educate me, take care of all my medical problems and you know what? I could even sell some shirts while I was there. I think that's so sad."
Culture shock
For the workers, many with a high school education or less, culture shock set in once they were out of work.
"It's almost as if we were in a time capsule," said Pelletier, who has a temporary job as a peer-support counselor at the state employment office. "Now that we're out in the world we find out that everyone works on a computer. Somebody thought up resumes and cover letters, which are good ideas, but when I went to work 36 years ago there was no such thing."
While the federal government offers free schooling for workers displaced by foreign competition, many of the women, like Pelletier, can't afford to take advantage of it because they need a job that provides insurance coverage, and unemployment benefits would run out for those in two-year retraining programs.
At the same time, the job market is so tight that of the 240 women laid off in October, only about 20 have found jobs, a number of them part time or seasonal.
Peggy Jason, a 61-year-old who sewed an average of 2,500 buttons on shirt cuffs a day at $8.01 an hour, needs a job to support her husband, Brad, who has lost two legs to diabetes and has had five heart attacks. While he has access to health care at a Veterans Affairs hospital, she has no medical insurance for herself.
She plans to start training in January as a personal care assistant to the sick or aged, but she is hoping the shirt factory reopens.
"It's difficult to find a job now. If this man can do it, I'm for it," she said. "But we've been hurt so many times it's not right to get your hopes up."
Waterville Solicitor William Lee said city officials are reviewing the proposal made by Peloquin, who has no experience in the textile business but has been known to take a gamble. He once bid to take over an Atlantic City, N.J., casino but lost out to Donald Trump.
City officials want to make sure that he has sufficient funds not only to acquire the building for cash, but also to pay employees, buy materials and make shirts during the considerable lag time between purchasing the factory and receiving revenue from sales.
Meanwhile, the Hathaway girls are abuzz with anticipation, and about 40 have signed up to be considered for rehiring.
"It feels like someone took a load off your shoulder," said Donna Charland, 43, who has been looking for a job as a security guard and found nothing. "It was like a security blanket to us. A lot of girls now have hope that there could be something out there for them."
Others are skeptical, having lived through "done deals" before that never got done.
"What they have to realize is that this is not Hathaway," said Vicki Gilbert, a union steward, who says she has had it with factory work and plans to train for office work.
"I think a lot of people are under the misconception that Hathaway is coming back," said Gilbert, 47. "What's happening is something new. I just wonder, if the orders weren't there and they couldn't compete before, what makes them think anything is different now?"