Deportations Could Upend This Parachute Factory
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What is the role of Mills Manufacturing in military parachute production?
A couple months ago, our colleague Ruth Simon took a trip to Asheville, North Carolina to tour a factory there.
I've got a five-minute tour and a five-hour tour and everything in between.
Okay, I'll take the in-between. Ruth is being led around the factory by John Oswald, CEO of Mills Manufacturing. Mills isn't just any factory. They make crucial equipment for the U.S. military, specifically parachutes. When a soldier jumps out of a plane, whether on a training mission or in combat, there's a good chance they're trusting a Mills parachute to carry them safely to the ground.
And if you have any questions or you're curious about anything, don't hesitate to stop and ask me.
I'm fascinated. I'm just trying to take it all in. Overhead, fluorescent lights illuminate rows of workstations covered with fabrics, straps, and thread. There are hundreds of sewing machines in the Mills factory, operated by employees who painstakingly cut and stitch each piece of each parachute. So how many steps to make a parachute?
Oh, so in this particular one, there's 27 steps.
A single skipped stitch among thousands is considered a major defect. Throughout the factory, signs spell out the company's mission — to bring troops safely to the ground 100 percent of the time.
And it's and your signs are all in English. Oh, you have it. Wait. So you have multiple languages. So English, Spanish, Moldovan and Russian.
But we also speak Ukrainian and Romanian.
Mills' signage is multilingual to reflect its workforce. A third of the factory's 155 employees are U.S.-born. The rest are immigrants, and dozens of them are here in the U.S. under an immigration status called humanitarian parole. It's a status that has come under fire from the Trump administration, and that's putting the Mills factory, its workers, and its ability to keep making parachutes at risk. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Annie Minoff. It's Thursday, June 5th. Coming up on the show, these workers make parachutes for the military. Now, they fear deportation.
Mills Manufacturing has been making parachutes since World War II. It's one of just two companies in the U.S. that are qualified to make the MC-6 and the T-11, the military's main personnel parachutes.
I had no idea what went into making a parachute for the military.
This week, I chatted with Ruth about her visit to Mills.
There is so little margin for error. So, like, if there is a flaw in one of these parachutes, the consequences could be really severe and very, very tragic. You're talking about people's lives who are at stake.
The man in charge of this tricky production is the one who was touring Ruth around, John Oswald.
Good morning.
Morning. He has short salt-and-pepper hair, a calm demeanor, and knows this factory inside and out. Oswald's been the CEO of Mills for 16 years, but he's worked there for even longer. You've been here for how many years?
I've been here 27 years.
Oswald joked with Ruth that he is one of the few people at Mills who doesn't sew, but he keeps the business running. Back in 2020, Oswald had a problem. Mills was getting more orders for parachutes than it could produce. Oswald needed more workers. But the labor market was tight, and his recruiting efforts were coming up short.
We just, we weren't able to hire the people. What was going on in the workforce, there weren't people out there looking for work.
The pay at Mills is decent. Workers can earn up to 20 bucks an hour, plus overtime, and they can get raises for mastering additional skills. But the work is difficult. Training a new worker can take months, and some don't stick around for long. Mills' employees cut and sew for 10-hour shifts.
There are many, many steps to making these parachutes. It is repetitive work. It requires a lot of attention and a lot of skill. And it's not work for everyone.
But around the summer of 2023, Oswald noticed that hiring was starting to get easier. At first, he didn't understand why.
We would have people that were coming in via referral.
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