DALTON, GEORGIA – Thirty miles south of Chattanooga, at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Georgia’s northwest corner, sits a low valley surrounded by green rolling hills. For the better part of the past century, the pastoral landscape, with its birdsong of quail and northern cardinal, camouflaged an industrial powerhouse.
Dalton prides itself as the carpet capital of the world. Over 80 percent of the tufted floor coverings manufactured in the United States are made here. Inside the old textile mills—200 of them at the industry’s height in the 1980s—machines would hum so loud that most workers stuck bits of tissue into their ears. Around that time, Dalton carried among the highest percentage of millionaires per capita of any city in America. “Any Bubba could strike it rich selling carpets out of their garage,” one local told me.
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The legacy of those years still resonates as a cultural identifier. Stroll through downtown and it’s hard to miss the imprint of the carpeting barons. Their names repeat on street signs, murals, hospital atriums donated from the philanthropic arms of their estates, and even restaurant menus (“the carpet pancake special”).
But while carpeting remains the town’s dominant employer, even those still involved in the industry would concede that the halcyon days have long passed. During the Great Recession, Dalton notched one of the highest unemployment rates in the country, peaking at 14.7 percent in March 2009 and persisting at 12.4 percent at the beginning of 2012. The mills never quite recovered. Employment in textile manufacturing in the region went from 21,900 in mid-2005 to 13,300 today, a drop of nearly 40 percent. Consolidation has reduced hundreds of manufacturers to just three.
Today, Dalton is less known for its commercial prowess than for the far-right former CrossFit instructor who represents the area in Congress, Marjorie Taylor Greene. But it’s also playing host to an early test of the Biden administration’s national experiment in industrial policy.
This deep-red area—nearly 70 percent of Whitfield County, of which Dalton is the county seat, voted for Donald Trump—is home to Hanwha Qcells, a South Korean–owned solar panel manufacturer that set up shop in 2019. Flush with tax credits from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the company announced a $2.5 billion expansion at the Dalton site and in Cartersville down the road, which is expected to create 2,000 new jobs. Aside from health care and education, Qcells is already the fourth-largest private-sector employer in Dalton, behind the three carpet giants—for now.
Washington has taken notice. Earlier this year, Vice President Kamala Harris gave a speech at the factory, and recently President Biden announced that he planned to visit Dalton once the new expansion is completed. Even Greene, who like every Republican didn’t vote for the IRA, has called Qcells “fantastic” and said that her constituents were “excited to have jobs.”
On paper, Dalton looks like the Bidenomics strategy in action, where capital investment will reduce greenhouse gas emissions, build the economy from the middle out, and create uncomfortable dilemmas for Republicans. But the national policy debate has outpaced the reality on the ground. While many Dalton residents have found work at Qcells or know someone who has, turnover is high and a foreign and out-of-state presence is plentiful, though the company vows to eventually hire locally. Perhaps more important, the administration’s economic agenda hasn’t translated yet into a political narrative that resonates with locals—not even local Democrats.
As Dalton transitions from an old company town to a new one, the task ahead for the Biden administration is to sell the benefits as a direct consequence of its agenda, which may prove even more difficult than getting the economics to work.
THE QCELLS PLANT SITS IN A SPRAWLING INDUSTRIAL PARK eight miles down South Dixie Highway from Dalton’s city center. The parking lot is full of pickup trucks with license plates from across the Deep South and Southwest.
The lot is packed, extending out onto a long dirt straight, because of construction under way at a new site next to the main plant. The expansion is part of Qcells’ ambition to onshore the majority of its supply chain in the U.S. and vertically integrate most of its operations, from silicon wafers to finished panels, much of which will be assembled nearby.
After struggling to compete against cheaper Chinese solar panels for years, Qcells celebrated the passage of the IRA for offering better assurance of return on investment. Though Qcells decided on the expansion just before passage of the law, the new facility will qualify the company for new advanced manufacturing production tax credits. Under a provision originally sponsored by Georgia’s Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff, the government will cover up to around 25 percent of the company’s capital investment. The company will also collect credits for the new complex being built a few towns over in Cartersville, a project that Qcells entirely attributes to the IRA.
Earlier this year, Qcells struck an agreement with Norwegian firm REC Silicon to exclusively supply polysilicon to convert into wafers from its Moses Lake, Washington, facility. The Dalton and Cartersville sites will then assemble the components into finished panels. The company recently signed the largest community solar order in history with Summit Ridge Energy to supply 1.2 gigawatts of power. It’s not even their largest order; a deal with Microsoft earlier this year was for twice that, at 2.5 gigawatts. Qcells is now projected to produce as much as 30 percent of all residential and commercial solar panels in the U.S. over the next decade, making it the nation’s largest producer. Executives credit the IRA for the recent success.
“The legislation has been a game-changer for us … [it] gave us the market assurances we needed to build our supply chains here in the U.S.,” said Marta Stoepker, head of public relations at Qcells.
In fact, the only objection is that the domestic content requirements for solar installation tax credits don’t go far enough. Qcells wants to see the Treasury Department extend the IRA’s made-in-America rules all the way down to silicon wafer components, to incentivize more U.S. production.
“That’s when we’ll start seeing an even more dramatic ramp-up in solar panel production to compete with China’s market,” said Mike Carr, executive director of the Solar Energy Manufacturers for America Coalition, of which Qcells is a member.
Olivia Ross/Chattanooga Times Free Press via AP
Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during her visit to the Qcells solar plant, April 6, 2023.
The IRA offers additional tax incentives if clean-energy construction sites pay prevailing wages and meet apprenticeship requirements. Qcells could have voluntarily signed a project labor agreement offering these wages but chose not to do so. The North Georgia building trades group says Qcells has not shown any interest in working with the union contractors they represent or signing community benefit agreements (which are distinct from PLAs). For this reason, the building trades’ business manager Randy Beall declined an invitation to attend Vice President Kamala Harris’s visit to Qcells earlier this year.
“Qcells has been a negative for us so I’m not going to put on a show and act like the company’s doing us a favor when they aren’t,” said Beall.
For the expanded site in Dalton, set to open in August, Qcells hired dozens of out-of-state contractors and subcontractors to manage construction. None of the major contractors are unionized, though the company has hired several members of the Millwrights union for the expansion.
Nevertheless, construction workers onsite, most of whom have been brought in from out of state, said their pay has been well above other projects they’ve worked on, and that routine safety checks and training have been performed every week. Workers are staying at nearby hotels and apartments, for which they’re given per diem payments by the companies.
Over at the main plant, workers file out at lunchtime and gather around patio areas to take a smoke break. While there are no union workers on the assembly lines either, the plant has already succeeded in improving conditions across Dalton’s industrial base. Qcells pays around $19 to $21 an hour for entry-level positions on the factory floor. That’s hardly middle-class wages, but it is several dollars higher than its chief competition for manufacturing in the area: the carpet companies. Most carpet plants have grudgingly increased pay to hold onto their workforces and manage labor shortages.
Many of the people I speak to outside Qcells came from carpeting looking for better jobs. “I had a bad boss at my old job and was ready for a change, so I got a job at Qcells which has improved my situation,” said Johnny Stamper, who works on the floor.
But I quickly notice that, when the lunch break hits, workers separate into two groups: the Americans and the South Koreans, of which there are many.
One point of tension between town officials and the company is how many foreign employees are being brought in to Dalton to work the higher-skilled positions. The company claims that many of the South Korean workers are on temporary assignments, either to help train other workers or to handle operations before the company can find qualified American replacements.
County officials have pushed Qcells to hire most of its workforce from the local area at higher pay, in exchange for property tax breaks given to the company. Qcells does help fund an extended training program for all new hires, which can range up to a year.
But some workers complained that the plant by and large doesn’t offer a professional pipeline for local residents to move up through skills training, like the carpeting plants do. That’s one reason why there’s a lot of churn in the workforce at Qcells, an issue that people in town frequently bring up. While many workers have been there since the plant opened in 2019, others found the jobs more demanding than carpeting, for only marginally higher pay.
Several workers also pointed out that the company hasn’t invested in enough Korean translators to assist with communication on the factory floor. Employees in the middle of active worksites have resorted to pulling out their phones to use Google Translate to try to describe complex engineering problems. One supervisor explained that, given the fast-paced environment, miscommunications are not just inefficient but could also prove disastrous. “If there’s going to be an accident onsite, it’ll be because of a translation issue … we’ve raised [the problem] to managers,” the supervisor said.
I SAT DOWN FOR BREAKFAST ON A FRIDAY MORNING with Dalton’s mayor, David Pennington, who grew irritated by the direction of the interview within the first ten minutes. The owner of an insurance brokerage by day, Pennington, 71, is in his second stint as mayor; he quit to run unsuccessfully in the Republican primary for governor in 2014, and then won back the seat by 11 votes in 2019. He wore khakis and a short-sleeved golf shirt, as though he just came from the local Rotary Club, where it turns out he used to be the president. We met at the Oakwood Cafe, a no-frills diner where the mayor eats every morning (except for Sundays) with two other middle-aged locals. The wives of this trio refer to their husbands’ early-morning confabs, always at the same booth in the back corner of the diner, as the “politburo.”
The diner is owned by Dalton’s representative in the state House, Kasey Carpenter, an ardent conservative who runs a small fiefdom of local enterprises downtown, including a nearby pizza joint and bar. A framed picture of Herschel Walker from his football days at the University of Georgia hangs on the wall across from us, next to other Georgia icons. Outside, there’s a mural on the facade of the building depicting the town’s history, including an illustration of Catherine Evans Whitener, the “first lady” of carpeting, and, reflective of more recent trends, a soccer goalie.
As carpet companies sought to cut costs, they contracted out more jobs from temp agencies, which relied on cheap and often undocumented immigrant labor. These hiring practices led to major demographic change in Dalton, which is now over 50 percent Latino. The town has added a nickname—Soccer Town U.S.A.—with the local high school routinely winning state titles. And while Whitfield County remains deep-red, pockets of the Dalton metro area are blue. Joe Biden won three precincts in Dalton in 2020, all on the east side of town across the railroad tracks where lower-income residents live.
Luke Goldstein
An abandoned carpeting store. Carpeting has long been the dominant industry, and employer, in Dalton.
Mayor Pennington was in no mood to talk about solar power. He seemed halfway between bemused and aggravated by my focus on Qcells and how it might change the town.
“All you reporters ask about is the solar panel plant and here’s the deal,” Pennington said. “People who live here know about Qcells, might even be excited about it. But guess what, they’re also excited about the new Olive Garden we’re about to have up the road.”
Pennington doesn’t see Qcells as a good fit for Dalton’s economic makeup. Dalton’s main workforce challenge, the mayor says, is that the county’s population sports one of the lowest higher-education rates in the entire state (it’s improved slightly in recent years, though still sits well below the state average, with a high school dropout rate more than twice as high as the state average). In the mayor’s view, Dalton doesn’t need more jobs as much as it needs high-quality jobs, and cleantech hasn’t yet solved this dilemma by opening up new opportunities that can lead to more stable middle-class lives.
Though blunt, the mayor’s assessment is not far off from what I heard from shop owners, Waffle House waitresses, bar patrons, and people young and old. Everyone is familiar with Qcells and knows someone who either currently works at the plant or cycled through. They’re glad to have another employer in the area. But they don’t think highly of the quality of the jobs at the plant, at least not yet. Most of all, they don’t connect the new Qcells expansion to any government program passed in Washington to jump-start the clean-technology sector.
Even Peter Pociask, a local Democrat who’s enthusiastic about green industrial policy, agrees with the mayor’s characterization of people’s attitudes.
“People aren’t ideological about the plant, they just want jobs and maybe that’s not such a bad thing,” said Pociask, who ran against Carpenter for Dalton’s state House seat in 2017 and lost handily. Some of the lessons he learned from getting trounced in the race could apply to the predicament national Democrats now find themselves in as they pitch clean-technology jobs.
“It’s hard to run on local issues without getting caught up in all the national frenzy and I found that out the hard way in my race,” said Pociask.
IDEOLOGY IS CERTAINLY A DRIVING FACTOR behind Mayor Pennington’s hostility to Qcells. He identifies as a business conservative and doesn’t think the government should be picking energy industry winners and losers (never mind the billions in subsidies oil and gas has received for decades). He’s a Reaganite of the old Washington consensus, who’s found himself at the center of the new consensus taking shape in his own backyard.
But most of his criticisms don’t stem from adherence to laissez-faire. It’s because he’s at the center of an emerging battle the carpeting industry is waging against the newest employer in town.
The mayor and his politburo are men of carpeting. None of them work directly in the business, but they defend its interests. King Carpet may be an aging ruler, but it still holds its grip over the town’s officials, and opposes the newcomers undermining its sovereignty. “Carpeting is still the lifeblood of this town and they’ve been with us through the good and bad,” said Pennington as the politburo nodded along.
Jan Pourquoi, the colorful spokesperson for the Whitfield County Democratic Party, has a far less charitable name for the politburo. He calls them “the good old boys in the big house” and describes their governing style as old-fashioned Southern paternalism. One example he brings up is when the city council was moving to a new building in 2004, the city cut a deal with Bob Shaw, former head of Shaw Industries—the oldest carpeting giant in Dalton—to take the old city council building as his own personal office.
Luke Goldstein
Jan Pourquoi, Whitfield County Democratic Party spokesperson and owner of a carpeting business
“There’s no better symbol for how carpeting runs the show here and officials act as their underlings,” said Pourquoi, who identified as a Republican until Trump’s election in 2016 before switching parties.
Pourquoi, a Belgian expat, knows the business from the inside. He told me to meet him for an interview at none other than the carpeting facility he runs, a small operation turning repurposed materials into home rugs. We spoke in his office, which looks out over the factory floor. Giant rolled-up carpets leaned against the walls, and torn-up tufting spilled out of bins alongside.
The carpeting industry exploded in the postwar era, when returning GIs and a boom in suburban housing created a massive market opportunity. Dalton had already been a textile hub due to its location, with transportation access to two rail lines, CSX and Norfolk Southern. Eventually, a major interstate highway, I-75, would run from the Great Lakes to South Florida, with a stop right through town.
When wall-to-wall carpeted flooring became the premier interior decoration choice for home remodeling in the 1980s and ’90s, Dalton found itself perfectly positioned to capitalize. Pourquoi, who stands at about six foot three, was transferred to Dalton around that time while working for a Belgian carpeting firm, and never left. As he describes it, everyone seemed to be getting rich from carpeting. Dalton, in many ways, reflected both the cultural values and laissez-faire business environment of the Reagan years, the greed-is-good era, the old Washington consensus.
A faded poster on the wall of the Dalton Brewing Company downtown offers a window into the decadent world of Dalton in this period. It captures the winner of the Miss Resaca Beach Poster Girl Contest, a major beauty pageant in Dalton that mainly served to promote the carpeting business. The 1983 pageant winner photographed is Marla Maples, a Dalton native who would go on to become Donald Trump’s second wife a decade later. Residents still talk about Maples with glowing pride, and women of a certain age even refer to her with familiarity using the royal “we.”
Because of the pageant, fashion scouts would come to Dalton to look for talent, as would wealthy bachelors from around the state searching for “Southern belle” wives, as The Washington Post put it in a profile of the town from 1990, entitled “The Hometown of the Killer Blondes.” The feature paints a picture of Dalton that reads like an extended chapter of The Bonfire of the Vanities, except in a small Southern town.
In the late 1990s, Dalton’s fortunes took a turn. Consumer preferences began to change to hardwood flooring over carpeting. The industry started to shrink, which led first to a massive wave of consolidation into a few giants, primarily Shaw Industries and Mohawk, which were both locally owned. Many of the owners of smaller carpet shops that got bought out by the big players took their money and left for Chattanooga or Atlanta.
Pourquoi was inside many of the “war room meetings” as the carpeting leaders in town decided how to adapt to the new business climate. They decided to begin shortchanging labor, as Pourquoi tells it. Though never unionized, workers’ wages had steadily risen over the years, which came along with larger sums of overtime pay because of changes in federal laws. This was the moment that cheap immigrant labor was sought out to staff the remaining plants.
After consolidation came financialization. A pivotal moment came in 2002 when Bob Shaw, Dalton’s most prominent local patron, sold Shaw Industries to Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. As privately owned carpeting corporations went public, Wall Street firms and venture capital captured controlling stakes.
To a lesser degree, foreign ownership has taken hold as well. While Mayor Pennington and many locals in town decry Qcells’ South Korean ownership, the same trend is true for the carpeting business today. The remaining companies have shifted more production to linoleum vinyl tile and flooring, which moves more of the supply chain for materials to Asia and requires fewer jobs. More of the homegrown industry’s profits now go outside of town than ever before.
THE GREAT RECESSION SAW A STRING OF JOB LOSS and a collapse of home construction, sapping demand for flooring of any kind. In the aftermath, certain local officials suggested that the town should move away from a single-industry model and diversify its economy to avoid being exposed to a sector-specific downturn. In the early 2010s, the county invested in a massive new industrial park, where Qcells now resides, with the explicit goal to reserve the site for new industries.
Pennington is resistant to diversification, at least insofar as it would further weaken carpeting. He’s not sold on the long-term prospects of Qcells. More specifically, he thinks the county put itself in a financial hole by drastically overpaying for the industrial park and using enormous tax abatement packages to woo companies like Qcells. Whitfield County and the state government attracted Qcells in 2018 by agreeing that the company wouldn’t have to pay property taxes for the first five years.
It’s not just Qcells though. Almost 15 percent of the local tax base in Dalton goes untaxed, and that includes a number of carpeting factories. The lost revenues from all these abatement packages have pushed taxes up for residents and homeowners. Blue and red municipalities alike are increasingly raising alarms about tax abatement schemes that facilitate a race to the bottom. The IRA manufacturing boom has equally led to soaring state subsidies to chase investment.
Interestingly, among Republican officials, Mayor Pennington is a lonely voice. Marjorie Taylor Greene, while not shy to condemn the environmental agenda, has given muted praise to Qcells. Even the owner of Pennington’s favorite diner has embraced clean technology as a job creator. State Rep. Carpenter, in fact, told me that he just bought an electric Rivian truck, and is trying to get funding to build more charging stations in town. Both Carpenter and county executive Jevin Jensen look at the federal funds flowing to clean-technology companies more pragmatically.
Though he took office in 2021, Jensen defends the tax abatement deal made in 2018 because of the higher wages the county negotiated with Qcells as a requirement, which he believes the company has honored. He also argues that if Dalton didn’t pony up for the tax breaks, Qcells would have gone elsewhere. “It’s money on the table, someone’s going to take it,” he said.
In many ways, that sums up the approach Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp has taken as well. Despite his agnosticism to climate change, Kemp has drawn EV battery makers, renewable firms, and other cleantech projects to the state, with boatloads of cash via state tax breaks. So far, it’s paid off, as Georgia turns into the epicenter of what’s been dubbed “the battery belt.”
This dispute between Republican officials in town is a window into an emerging rift within the GOP about the new green-economy jobs in their states and how it might shape the party’s future political coalitions. Republicans in Dalton, however, all agree that, if any politician should get credit for Qcells, it should be former President Trump for placing tariffs on solar in 2018, which the company cites as a major factor at least in building a U.S. plant back in 2019. “Those jobs were jobs in my district under the Trump administration,” Greene has said. “Qcells … gave all the credit to the local counties there that helped them get started, and [Republican] Gov. [Brian] Kemp and the Trump administration.”
Alyssa Pointer/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, center, participates in a ribbon cutting with Hanwha Qcells CEO Charles Kim, second from right, during the Dalton facility’s grand opening, September 20, 2019.
This backstory, while it ignores Qcells’ strong and explicit support of the IRA, demonstrates the multifaceted nature of the new industrial policy, which President Biden will have to navigate in order to convince voters of the administration’s achievements. And it also reveals the quiet confidence among red-state politicians in a red county that they have a story to sell to their supporters, to help ensure that Biden doesn’t ride a wave of local prosperity to political success.
Democrats in Dalton seem to have internalized this skepticism that they can make the green-manufacturing boom work for them. I asked Pourquoi whether the new Washington consensus represented by Qcells could reshape the city and potentially break up the mayor’s “big house” that he’s been fighting against. He believes that the prospects are grim. “Voters aren’t rational actors carrying scorecards in their back pockets to tally up political wins and losses, that’s just a fantasy,” said Pourquoi.
His diagnosis of the situation mirrors the “submerged state” phenomena, a term popularized in the early Obama years to describe a style of policymaking that overrelies on the tax code and thus obscures government’s involvement in people’s daily lives. Even people in town benefiting from the new jobs at Qcells see it as a business investment, not a government program.
Even as the Biden administration tries to put a spotlight on Qcells, Pourquoi still finds it hard to believe that the message can spread widely. That’s because Dalton, like many small towns, has become a news desert. There’s a local paper, in operation since 1847, but the general disengagement with politics is evident in the vote totals of the last mayoral election: less than 2,800 in a city with nearly 16,000 registered voters. The low higher-education rate and the large undocumented population means many residents don’t tend to follow national news.
The local Democratic Party in Whitfield County has recently tried to make up for these information silos by taking out targeted ads in the area about a local environmental lawsuit that will cost Dalton millions of dollars. The city of Rome recently won a major settlement against the city and its major carpeting companies for failing to adequately inspect water contamination from PFAS, “forever” chemicals that were dumped for decades into the nearby Conasauga River that snakes around the edge of town.
It’s the kind of hyperlocal strategy that you’d expect the party might consider using to inform voters about how the IRA is helping Dalton. But Pourquoi doesn’t think it would be effective. Though a Biden supporter, he often rails against the “Atlanta Democrats” as vociferously as he does against MAGA Republicans. He thinks the national party’s image, whether fairly portrayed or not, hurts the local party’s chances in rural districts like Dalton’s.
“We need to get back to bread-and-butter issues because many of the new social positions the party has taken only hurt us around here,” said Pourquoi. But the IRA, at least in theory, is a bread-and-butter issue, about job creation and economic growth.
Pourquoi argues that the assembly line at Qcells can’t be a dead end. Rather than grandstanding about low-wage jobs, he’d prefer to see Democrats focus on investing in apprenticeship education and skills training, to improve the qualifications for locals to work as engineers at Qcells. That’s how he believes the party could lift median incomes and ensure a pathway to better middle-class jobs. It’s mostly aligned with Mayor Pennington’s critique. But for both of them, the idea of making line-level jobs in a prosperous industry better, whether through union campaigns or other means, doesn’t come up.
THERE’S A MAJOR BLIND SPOT in giving up entirely on selling Qcells. Dalton is a majority-Latino town, which local Democrats have never been able to capitalize on. Many Latinos in the area, who are now second- or even third-generation, are conservative. But the larger problem is that most don’t see a reason to participate in politics at all, especially younger Latinos.
From talking to a broad cross section of locals at the bars and restaurants along the strip known as the “Spanish Downtown,” I found that most don’t hold carpeting in high regard, and many know friends or family who’ve switched to Qcells looking for better work. I spoke to three younger Latino men who together run a Dalton-focused podcast, interviewing people on the street, friends, small-business owners, and local personalities. Their parents came to Dalton in the late 1990s from Mexico and the Dominican Republic to work carpeting jobs. After working in the plants for years, their parents bear the health effects from the grueling labor and repetitive motions.
“My mother has arthritis now and can’t hold her hands still without them shaking,” said Adan Ramos, who’s a nurse in training. “So I said there’s no way I’m going to end up doing that for the rest of my life.”
All three of them began working in carpeting after high school, but didn’t last long at the jobs before deciding to look elsewhere. One works as a salesman for Verizon, and the other is between service jobs.
Lots of their friends had the same experience and many switched to working at Qcells, getting brought on through a temp agency to start, before getting hired on full-time. Though the pay is somewhat better, many left because of the working conditions. Still, they see it as a better alternative to carpeting.
At one point in our conversation, I brought up Marjorie Taylor Greene. A few of them knew who she was, name-checking the “Jewish space laser” controversy, but others didn’t know she was their congresswoman. Politics, to them, has just been a “clown show” for their whole adult lives, and they don’t see the difference in voting or not.
If the Biden administration and local Democrats want to change the political trajectory of the town, perhaps through the support of politically independent Latinos, they will have to convince them of the connection between their legislative actions and higher-paying clean-energy jobs. But the jobs and opportunity might have to be a bit better, and the politicians more than a bit bolder in making those connections real.
The Prospect’s reporting on the implementation of the Biden administration’s industrial policy is supported through funding from Omidyar Network.
