ROANOKE TIMES 
                      Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times

DATE: Thursday, February 15, 1996            TAG: 9602150028
SECTION: EDITORIAL                PAGE: A-10 EDITION: METRO 

RURAL SOUTH TURNING AROUND JOB MIGRATION

SOUNDS FAMILIAR: A small Southern town depends on one factory for most of its jobs. The plant closes. Jobs disappear. The town reels. Sometimes, it dies.

Rural Virginia knows the scenario. The little town of Fries, for example, has had to struggle to hold together the threads of a community since its textile mill closed in 1988. Harder hit than the textile industry, though, are the so-called needle trades, the garment factories where clothing is sewn together.

For decades, these jobs have been migrating to countries where labor is cheaper. The number of garmentmakers in the United States dropped from 1.36 million to 895,000 between 1970 and September of last year, and more than half the lost jobs were in the South.

It gets worse.

Maybe. Or maybe not.

Historian Tennant McWilliams, a professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, warns that the South will lose control of its future if the migration of workers from rural to urban areas continues to drain small towns of population. With the people goes the demand for land. With the demand for land goes local ownership.

McWilliams predicts timber companies from the Northeast or Pacific Northwest will buy up land in the South, and will begin to wield disproportionate influence on how land is used and how it is taxed. That will affect how much revenue is available for social services and education - human investment if you will.

There won't be much, he fears, and the rural South will have an ever-harder time modernizing and becoming economically competitive.

As these low-wage jobs move overseas, though, another economic trend is occurring - a revolution, in fact. It's the telecommunications revolution. More and more, it is freeing workers and entire businesses from the physical confines of urban areas, and sending jobs back to rural America. To benefit, localities must preserve an attractive quality of life. But even more important is a well-educated, technologically sophisticated workforce - the kind of workforce that can control its destiny.

So the priority in the rural South must be what it is elsewhere: education.

LENGTH: Short :   48 lines