Microfibres closing in Pawtucket

PAWTUCKET – Microfibres Inc. is closing and filing for bankruptcy, a union official said Wednesday.
“We heard today that the company will be closing … We’ve known for a while that the company’s been struggling,” Ethan Snow, chief of staff for the New England Joint Board UNITE HERE, a union representing textile workers, said.
Snow said that for some time, the company, which was founded in 1926 and manufactures and distributes flocked upholstery fabrics and nylon velvet products, has been operating on a schedule of one week on, one week off. It employs 57 people in Pawtucket, he said, noting it also has other locations, including in North Carolina, where 125 people are employed. It also has locations in Tupelo, Miss., Belgium and China.
“The textile industry is a very competitive industry and a struggling industry in the United States,” Snow said.
He said Microfibres’ major market was in Russia and Europe, and that it just lost its biggest customer in Russia.
The workers at Microfibres have jobs “that really kind of don’t exist anymore, highly specialized jobs in the textile industry,” Snow said. He said the union is talking with company officials to ensure the workers “get what’s legally owed” to them.
Snow said the union has filed for trade adjustment assistance with the state Department of Labor and Training so that the employees can receive additional training. He said this is available to manufacturing workers whose jobs have been lost due to overseas competition.
A Microfibres representative in Pawtucket could not be reached for comment.
An article in the Winston-Salem Journal said financial difficulties are behind the closing, which could happen by the end of the week.
Steve Trastelis, general manager of the North Carolina plant and a corporate vice president of operations, told the newspaper, “We’ve looked for emergency funding and haven’t found it yet.”
In 1998, the company employed as many as 186 people at its Pawtucket headquarters on Moshassuck Street and 1,000 employees worldwide.

WJAR Channel 10 reported that Microfibres is where a new occupational disease was detected by a Brown University researcher in the mid-1990s after several employees had respiratory problems.

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