DALTON, Ga. -- Marty and Tammy Tankersley have driven here from their Resaca, Ga., home for years to work driving trucks, stitching carpeting or serving restaurant food.
But last week, Mr. Tankersley drove to Dalton to pick up one of his last unemployment checks after losing his driving job more than a year ago. His wife, Tammy, is trying to make do working only 16 hours a week at a local Subway.
"It used to be you could always make good money in Dalton," she said. "But today, there just aren't many jobs and a lot of businesses have closed."
The economic fortunes of Dalton, the self-described Carpet Capital of the World, are tied to the carpet and floorcovering industry. The 3-year-old housing slump has cut carpet shipments by more than a third and kept the jobless rate across much of Northwest Georgia in double digits for most of the past year and a half.
Dalton backers say they see signs of recovery and expect the carpet industry will continue to power the region's economy. A new economic recruitment campaign -- Grow Greater Dalton -- is the biggest ever for Northwest Georgia. The $4.5 million campaign is designed to recruit more visitors, residents and businesses to Dalton, including suppliers for the new Volkswagen plant 30 miles north in Chattanooga.
"Nobody knows for sure what the world will look like on the other side of this economic abyss," said David Gregg, chief executive of the Alliance National Bank and chairman of the Dalton/Whitfield County Chamber of Commerce. "But we do know we have a crown jewel in our carpet industry that continues to bring innovation to the market."
Mr. Gregg said Dalton can build upon its manufacturing tradition in carpeting to help bring in other factories to the area.
"Our high unemployment rate means we do have a lot of available workers who are well trained and ready to work," he said.
Carpet casualties
But as the carpet industry continues to consolidate and upgrade technologies, experts concede that some of the jobs lost during what economists are billing as "the Great Recession" may not be coming back.
Employment in metropolitan Dalton jumped 37 percent during the 1990s as carpet sales grew. But since its peak in 2006, employment in the two-county Dalton metro area has declined by 13,100 jobs, or 16.6 percent.
The housing and construction boom that powered the growth of Georgia over the past two decades stalled two years ago, helping to push Georgia's jobless rate in February to a recession high of 10.7 percent. Since then, Georgia's job losses have averaged 25 percent more than the rest of the nation.
"We had a great construction boom in Georgia, but that industry has been hit during this recession on every front," Georgia State University economist Rajeev Dhawan said.
Dr. Dhawan said credit likely will flow less freely in the future. Since 2008, regulators have seized 37 banks in Georgia -- more than in any other state.
Signs of recovery
The economy is showing some early signs of recovery, including a report Friday that the U.S. economy added 162,000 jobs last month. The recession appears to have ended last year, but the economic growth since then hasn't been enough to push most employers into hiring more workers.
Mark Vitner, senior economist for WellsFargo Wachovia Bank in Charlotte, N.C., calls the recovery so far "one that only a statistician would like" because it is yet to translate into lower unemployment.
"The damage that was done by this recession is really mind-boggling, so even though things are improving, it will be a couple of years to get back to where we were on the jobs front," he said.
In metropolitan Chattanooga, employment has dropped by 23,500 jobs from the peak reached in July 2007, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In the past decade, the number of manufacturing jobs has dropped by more than a third.
In metropolitan Cleveland, Tenn., employment fell by 2,600 jobs from 1999 to 2009, including 5,200 jobs lost in manufacturing during the decade, government figures show.
Productivity gains
Despite the decline in factory jobs, however, manufacturing output in the region still is nearly as great as it was a decade ago because of steady productivity gains.
"All businesses have learned to do more with less," University of Tennessee economist William Fox said.
At the new Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, for instance, an army of 398 robots will do much of the work in the body shop where cars will be assembled starting in early 2011. The new jobs involve more brains than brawn to operate the high-tech machines capable of ever-more precise assembly.
"The business world is much different than in the past and workers will need to be more skilled and educated," said Tom Edd Wilson, president of the Chattanooga Area Chamber of Commerce, which helped recruit VW to Chattanooga two years ago. "Businesses today must compete in a global market and be as efficient as possible."
Among nearly 200 readers of the Chattanooga Times Free Press responding to a survey about future challenges, their biggest community concerns focused upon human resource challenges -- education, crime and jobs.
David McArthur, a 49-year-old unemployed worker in Dalton, is among those eager for the economic turnaround.
He left the construction industry in 2007 to take up what he thought was a more secure future driving a truck. But Mr. McArthur lost that job last year.
"Hopefully, I can get a job soon because I just found out my unemployment benefits have run out," he said. "I've never seen the market this bad."
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