Cotton mill robots

Over the course of his 15 years working for Hanesbrands at their Parkdale cotton mill the claimant I was questioning had done virtually every job in the factory that a guy with only a high school education could get: laborer, machine operator and finally machine mechanic.

“Except for the front end, Judge, you know where they gin the raw cotton.”

“Why didn't you ever work the gin end?”

“It's just too dirty, you know, dust, seeds and sticks, cotton fiber everywhere.”

I had already established that he and his wife moved up to Central New York from eastern Georgia so they could get help from his wife's family while they figured out what to do next. His wife was working as a home health aide, not making much, but they were scraping by. His back gave out on him at age 45 from a combination of bad genes and hard physical labor.

“So how much would you have to lift when you were a machine tender, back when you first worked at Hanes?”

“Well you see, the cotton would be run through the first machines then wound onto a roll that would get taken off to the next set of machines. Those rolls probably weigh about 100 pounds each.”

“Would you have to lift one of those rolls yourself?”

“Sort of, we would slide them out of the machine then heft them onto a cart, so yeah, I had to lift them a bit.”

“OK, how often did you do this?”

“All day, over and over. You might not know it, Judge, but we worked 12 hour shifts at that mill, three days on, then one off, then two on, one off, then three again. About once a month we got a straight week off but the next week we had to work seven days straight, then back to the same schedule all over again.”

“Was it seasonal work? Did you work more hours during the cotton harvest?”

“No, that was the schedule year-round. The company has a big warehouse full of cotton modules, so there was always work. It is the third largest yarn factory in the world. It can put out 1.5 million pounds of cotton yarn every 12 hour shift.”

[In case you don't know about cotton modules, you can take a look at a post I wrote about how cotton modules are made a few years back. You can find that article here.]

“I see, so what job did you do next?”

“I ran a bunch of carding machines for a few years, then ran the spinning machines.”

“Were those machine operator jobs as hard?”

“No, that was pretty easy work, actually. There wasn't any lifting to speak of. You just have to watch the machines to be sure they don't jam up or anything. If that happens then you turn off the machine, climb in and try to unjam it. If the operator can't clear the jam, you call a mechanic.”

“OK, so what was the hardest part of your machine operator jobs?”

“I'd say cleaning the machines after the shift. You would have to climb all over them dragging an air hose to blow off all the cotton lint and dust. So there was a real lot of climbing.”

“Was dragging that air hose heavy?”

“No, not unless one of those stupid robots ran over the hose.”

“Excuse me sir, did you say robots?”

“Yeah, see Fruit of the Loom got them first. They found out pretty quick that they didn't work all that well, so they got rid of them by selling them to Hanes. Let me tell you Judge, those robots are really stupid.”

“Sir, excuse me, but even though it doesn't have much to do with your case, would you mind telling me a bit more about the robots?”

“Sure, see they use them now to do the heavy lifting of the fiber rolls and move the rolls around the plant. They are sort of like big boxes on wheels. They run around the mill following magnetic tape on the floor. They've got some sensors to keep them from running into anything or anybody, but the two on the side point out, and the two in the front point in. That leaves two big blind spots. Believe me, they run into things. I heard a woman got caught between two that where running in opposite directions. They broke three of her ribs.”

 “So these robots would run around the mill and sometimes your air hose would get caught under them, is that right?”

“Yeah, when that happened and I would pull on the hose, it felt like I was hauling on 1000 pounds. Not only that, but they would go off the tape and run into the machines or the walls. Some of the guys figured that all the fiber on the floor was messing them up. If fact someone discovered that they would follow a polyester ribbon just as well as the magnetic tape. One day at the end of the shift, somehow all the robots ended up in the ladies room.”

I resumed the hearing as soon as we all stopped laughing.