FAYETTE, June 21 — Rising from a muddy field on the outskirts of the small town of Fayette, Alabama is a bricks-and-mortar symbol of the global Covid pandemic: A new glove factory.
“There’s a burgeoning glove manufacturing industry popping up in this country, a lot of it funded by the government,” said Dan Izhaky, chief executive of New York-based United Safety Technology, which got US$96 million in federal backing to begin to transform an empty Baltimore steel plant. Showa was expanding a small, decades-old glove factory in Fayette — originally built to make old-style latex gloves — when the pandemic struck. Seeing an opening for a revival of larger-scale US glove manufacturing as the government reconsidered the wisdom of heavily relying on foreign sources, the company decided to triple the size of its expansion.
A view of a newly constructed building of the factory of SHOWA, a large Japanese glove producer, in Fayette, Alabama June 2, 2022. — Reuters picHe and a partner hastily built a face mask factory with private funds in Los Angeles early in the Covid crisis but was forced to shutter it when mask prices collapsed and customers evaporated. Most of the mask factories that sprang up during the pandemic have closed.
But it remains a risky proposition. The Biden administration has not guaranteed it will buy the output of these new operations, and the cost of producing domestically, even using the latest equipment, is expected to remain higher than imports. Alison Bagwell is an American engineer who spent most of her career working for Kimberly-Clark, setting up glove factories in Thailand and Malaysia. With private backing, she is building a US$70 million plant in Sandersville, Georgia, set to open next year.In Fayette, the Showa factory is churning out gloves in the original production area and a towering new addition that holds the first four new production lines.
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