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But it isn't just NAFTA, he said. "It's global competition."

In the past five years, about 76,000 workers in North Carolina have lost their jobs to foreign trade, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Alamance County has seen its share of the pain, with manufacturing jobs here falling more than 40 percent this decade. The unemployment rate was 5.7 percent in February -- a touch above the 5.4 percent rate the previous year.

Mac Williams, president of the Chamber of Commerce, said Burlington is trying to turn it around with new industries. The county's largest employer is LabCorp, a medical testing company with more than 3,000 workers and the steel frame of a new plant rising near the town airport.

Flashes of hope

In the shadow of the dying mill, some feel a little hope.

Bright, the hair stylist, looked out her shop window and said she would love to see LabCorp put its jobs in that old brick mill.

"If LabCorp buys it, it will upper this whole entire area," Bright said.

And of course, Bill Clinton was in Elon to say that all isn't lost. Manufacturing jobs can come back, he said in his speech to hundreds of college students. He spoke about manufacturing for about 60 seconds.

"The economy is in terrible shape," he said.

Riley, the mill worker losing her job, said she's already in bankruptcy.

Her daughter and three grandchildren live with her, and she must provide for them too.

She started her beat-up Chevy Corsica for her second job in the kitchen of a nursing home, wondering how she'll pay the bills when the knitting machines go quiet this summer.

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