The Shirt on Your Back: Immigrant Workers and the Reorganization of the Garment Industry

Abstract

Introduction The shift of production away from export-processing zones in developing countries and back to urban sites in the U.S. is increasing in the multinational garment industry today. This research details that process, focusing on Philadelphia as a case study. Historical comparison discloses striking similarities between tendencies in the industry today and the characteristics of enterprises at its inception nearly 100 years ago. Part I summarizes the industry's origins in the U.S. at the turn of the century, based as it was on the exploitation of poor, young, female immigrants. Part II briefly outlines the considerations, especially labor costs, that motivated apparel manufacturers to move their operations to export-processing zones within developing countries (following relocation by some to the Southern states in the U.S.). Parts III and IV describe the recent pattern in which garment corporations are again turning to sweatshop production in the United In an historical parallel, low-wage immigrant women workers are once more serving as the labor force. Evidence for Parts III and IV is drawn primarily from Philadelphia as well as the New York City-New Jersey-Philadelphia corridor.(1) To illustrate the manner in which U.S. multinational garment industries have moved abroad, especially to sites within developing regions, I have been fond of asking students in my Third World development class to turn to the person next to them and identify the country in which their clothing was made by looking at the label inside the collar. Guaranteed such foreign factory sites as Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, or Singapore, and, in recent years, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Jamaica, Colombia, or Malaysia, I never failed to illuminate a dominant trend: the shirt on your back was made by women workers in a faraway, low-wage, Third World country. Of late, however, this exercise has been backfiring. Increasingly, students were shaking their heads. Not hers. Hers was made in the United States. Right. Mine says |Made in the USA.' Recognizing a pattern too strong to deny, I pondered the question: What is going on with this foot-loose industry? How is it possible that these products are being made at home when conventional wisdom insists that U.S. unemployment in the garment-manufacturing sector, like other manufacturing industries, is caused by the movement of these plants overseas? The explanation lies in the increasing decision by multinational apparel corporations to contract garment production out to a network of underground sweatshops concentrated in New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Miami, Los Angeles, and Seattle, and scattered more sparsely from coast to coast. Garment sweatshops are proliferating in the U.S. at a rate unparalleled since the 19th century, when young European immigrant women worked 12 to 16 hour days for a pittance. Today, the global garment-assembly line increasingly begins and ends on our own front steps. Wherever the garment industry has taken root in the U.S., unlicensed, substandard sewing shops have sprung up by the hundreds. They are illegal, off-the-books, pay no minimum wages, unemployment insurance, or health benefits and ignore child-labor laws or overtime pay regulations. In New York or Philadelphia, Asian or Latina women may be working 12 and 14 hours a day or 7 days a week, without overtime pay, to make the Arrow shirts or Liz Claiborne blouses we buy at the mall. One campaign alone organized by Mujeres Obreras (a group working to organize women in the border shops of Texas) has targeted 17 major garment corporations, 11 national retailers that own 26 department store chains, and 298 national brands as manufacturers and retailers of apparel produced in U.S. sweatshops. These are well-known brand names, ranging from K-Mart, Wrangler, Crazy Horse, and Izod to Hart Schaffner and Marx, Evan-Picone, Diane Von Furstenberg, J.G. Hook, Christian Dior, and Jones of New York. …