Leaving the Loom

`We watched the new factory being built, and our hopes grew with it

`We watched the new factory being built, and our hopes grew with it. We thought this would take us at last into the 20th century, that there would be some future for our children around here," says Caroline Bonner, a SIPTU shop steward.

Workers at the Dungloe Fruit of the Loom factory in Co Donegal are today facing their first day on the dole, but they are expected to be joined by hundreds more employees over the coming months as the multinational clothing company's future in Ireland appears increasingly uncertain.

Through a high perimeter fence surrounding a new state-of-the-art factory five Fruit of the Loom workers look wistfully at the canteen they thought would be theirs. The factory, positioned high on a hill overlooking Dungloe Bay, was built specially for Fruit of the Loom to cater for more than 500 workers.

The women recall the long hot summer of 1995, watching the factory being built. Three years later, wind blows around its closed doors and the Tarmacadam on the empty loading bay lies jet-black and untouched. The factory never opened and yesterday the five women, along with 48 other workers, were made redundant, walking for the last time from a smaller Fruit of the Loom plant down the road.

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Fruit of the Loom is by far the biggest employer in Co Donegal, where the rate of unemployment is more than twice the State average. Up until yesterday the company was located in five towns in the county, providing work for more than 2,000 people in total. Another 530 people work in two plants in Derry.

In some areas there is a huge dependency on Fruit of the Loom jobs, particularly on the Inishowen peninsula. The company's main base is in Buncrana, a town of 5,000, where more than 1,200 are employed in three different plants.

There are many instances of married couples or whole families of brothers and sisters depending on the factories for their income. The McDermott family in Castlecooly, seven miles from Buncrana, offers the most striking example. Eight of the 12 McDermotts work for Fruit of the Loom. Three of the children are still at school and just one son works elsewhere.

Their mother, Mary McDemott, doesn't want to contemplate a future without the company. "It would mean big changes because the full income in this house comes from Fruit of the Loom. If what they say is true, there could be 1,000 people to get jobs for. That would be some amount of people signing on the broo," she says.

Two of her sons are married, with their own households to support and mortgages to pay. The wife of one of them is also an employee. Mrs McDermott echoes the views of many in Co Donegal when she says she can't imagine any company arriving to take the place of Fruit of the Loom.

Geraldine McDermott (18) was typical of hundreds of young Donegal girls when she left school at the age of 15 to work in the textile factory. "I regret it now, but at the time everybody was going in to work there. The money was good and nobody ever thought this would happen. People thought they had jobs for life," she says.

Her 21-year-old sister, Siobhan, who has worked in the factory for six years, agrees. "People didn't go on for an education because they thought this was going to last. They were starting so many different plants."

Second-level teachers in the area say they had a difficult task convincing youngsters to stay in school to do the Leaving Cert. To teenagers, the wages offered appeared too good to pass up for the sake of getting a qualification. Fruit of the Loom has a reputation for paying better than other factories and the average weekly gross pay for workers in the sewing division is between £200 and £250.

While the McDermott sisters are talking about the prospect of being laid off, the reality is that they, like more than 2,000 others, simply don't know what's going to happen. The only official line from the company is that there will be no lay-offs, other than those of yesterday in Dungloe, before the end of this year.

But there has been a great deal of speculation and many ominous signs. Seven of the eight McDermotts, for example, have already been put on a three-day week. It is accepted that at least 700 jobs are in danger in Co Donegal because of the company's plans to relocate its low-margin, labour-intensive T-shirt division from Ireland to low-cost factories in Morocco. It is feared that if these go, others could follow.

At the end of the sewing shift in Buncrana, a mixture of women - some middle-aged, many under 30 - stream from the plant onto waiting buses to travel home to villages and townlands over a wide radius. There is considerable anger at the continuing speculation over their jobs and the lack of information from the company. In August, workers first heard of the possible 700 job losses on the radio as they went to work.

Finola Porter has worked in the Buncrana factory for 22 years, from long before the 1986 buy-out of the generations-old McCarter family firm by Fruit of the Loom. "People are disgusted at not knowing what's going to happen. We're listening to different rumours every day. We want to know before Christmas. We know we are going but we just want to know when," she says.

SIPTU shop steward Bridie Burns says people want to know if this is going to be their last Christmas with a wage, or the first year without one. She is a member of the task force set up specifically by the Tanaiste and Minister for Enterprise and Employment, Mary Harney, to look for alternative employment for the county.

"If workers knew exactly what was going to happen and when, they could at least address their individual circumstances. They feel now that the company is playing with people's livelihoods in delaying the inevitable," says Burns.

Some people in Co Donegal are slow to criticise Fruit of the Loom despite the underlying feeling that they are pawns in the game of international big business. Many say they are "grateful" for the work they got.

The arrival of Fruit of the Loom in 1986, with its impressive development plans, gave new hope to many communities. With relatively well-paid jobs, young people could afford to go on sun holidays, couples could get mortgages and many, who would otherwise have emigrated, were able to stay at home. With uncertainty, things change rapidly - workers have already been turned down for mortgages and few will be confident enough to pay a deposit for next year's summer holiday.

Buncrana will not be the only town to suffer in the event of large-scale job losses. The satellite plants, in Malin, Raphoe and Milford, could also be badly affected. In the Malin plant on the northerly tip of the Inishowen peninsula, 112 people are employed. In Milford, a town of some 800 people on the Fanad peninsula, there are 165 on the payroll, and further south in Raphoe, about 380 are employed in a town with a population of just over 1,000 people. Some 300 sewing workers in the Malin and Raphoe factories have recently been put on a two-day week.

The course of events in Dungloe will offer little consolation for employees elsewhere. This week, as workers planned their final lunch - in the restaurant where they have held their Christmas party in previous years - their trade union representatives were preparing for a Labour Court hearing, due yesterday. Negotiations had failed to reach agreement on a redundancy package, and the fact that this hearing was only occurring on the final day of operations, is seen as the final insult.

Workers are also angry that after they were served with three months' notice at the end of August, the company tried to put them on a three-day week. They say it was only with the support of employees in the other plants that they won the right to serve out their notice on a full-time basis.

Caroline Bonner and her four fellow Dungloe workers are not optimistic about the prospects of an alternative industry being found. They are tired of being told of the difficulties in attracting industry to Co Donegal.

For them, peripherality is even a bigger issue. Officially in the Gaeltacht, Dungloe is nearly an hour's drive from both Letterkenny and Donegal town. The vast majority of jobs are seasonal. On a day in mid-November the town's two main hotels are closed.

Four of the five women are married, and none of their husbands work. The Fruit of the Loom wage was therefore the only income in their households. Elaine Boyle is in her early 30s and has three children aged between seven and 13. The prospect of unemployment, she says, is a constant worry.

"You wake up in the morning and it's the first thing that comes into your mind. You're worrying about things - trying to look ahead, but you can't go too far ahead. The children come in and ask for things, and before this we might have been fit to afford them, but now it's going to be all the time saying `No, no, no, I can't get you that, I can't afford it'. But children of that age don't understand."

Some of the other women have children in third-level education, who cannot survive on maintenance grants alone. Unless they find other jobs quickly, they don't know how their sons and daughters will be able to continue in college. They have already accepted the reality that their children will not find work close to home.

Helen O'Donnell (25) is one of the small percentage of young people who decided to stay in Dungloe, giving up the chance to make use of a two-year course in Business Studies she completed at the Letterkenny Institute of Technology. "The problem is that if you want to stay at home, then you have to take what's given to you. If you want a better standard of life, then you have to go away."

Brid McCole brought up her three daughters as Irish speakers and she is proud that they started school without any English. Now grown-up, they have all left the Gaeltacht. She has been working since her husband suffered a second heart attack and she is angry that no redundancy package has been agreed. "To walk out with no redundancy money is a disgrace. We only asked for what was fair."

Udaras na Gaeltachta, which built the hilltop factory for Fruit of the Loom at a cost of £5 million, is not as pessimistic about the chances of finding a new tenant. It is pointed out that Fruit of the Loom has been paying rent on the factory since 1996.

Spokesman Padraig O hAolain says Udaras is "reasonably hopeful" that Malaysian pharmaceutical company Hoh Yan Hor will go ahead with plans to set up there. A "substantial financial package" was agreed, but the Asian economic crisis has put the project, which would have created 200 jobs, on hold.

"They are assuring us that they are reasonably confident that they will be able to proceed," O hAolain says. Udaras is going ahead with plans to refurbish the plant to suit Hor Yan Hor. Discussions are also ongoing with two other companies in relation to smaller projects for the north Donegal area.

The workers would just like something more definite. Rita Boyle has four children aged from 10 to 21. "We're living here in Donegal and they're telling us that industry doesn't want to come here. But we're the same as everybody else - we want jobs, we have mortgages, we want the same cars. We want our children to have an education. We just want everything that everybody else has."