A Coat of Many Colors: Immigration, Globalization, and Reform in New York City's Garment Industry

Introduction: The Rise and Fall of the Garment Industry in New York City

Introduction The Rise and Fall of the Garment Industry in New York City Daniel Soyer F or more than one hundred and fifty years, from the middle of the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth, the garment industry was the largest manufacturing industry in New York City. For much of that time, the needle trades employed more New Yorkers than any other sector, and New York produced more clothing than any other city in the country. While the local apparel industry’s size and vitality have declined sharply in recent decades, the garment industry remains a significant part of the city’s economy, especially for certain ethnic communities ; and it has made a deep imprint on New York’s history and selfimage . It therefore merits continued attention, not only by historians but also by economists, sociologists, and others who are interested in the ongoing life of the city and its people. The essays in this book examine the garment industry’s impact on such immigrant groups as Jews, Italians, Dominicans, and Chinese; the different experiences of men and women in the needle trades; the social and economic forces that led the industry to move around the city and, ultimately, out of it; and the struggles against the sweatshop. Indeed, the garment industry has attracted the most attention precisely in periods when concern over the sweatshop, an outgrowth of the industry ’s peculiar hierarchical structure, has been greatest. In an industry characterized by seasonality and fashion instability, the largest firms at the 4 A Coat of Many Colors top of the clothing hierarchy have usually sought to minimize fixed costs and farm out much of the work to small independent contractors—who, as Daniel Soyer discusses in this volume, depend on keeping down labor costs and overhead in order to eke out a profit on the narrowest of margins . At the bottom of the hierarchy, shop- and homeworkers toil away in terrible conditions for low wages. As Eileen Boris shows below, unions, consumers, students, feminists, and others have mounted periodic campaigns against the sweatshop but have had a difficult time finding the point of greatest leverage from which to reform the industry. Although they have met with occasional success, the problem has returned repeatedly . It should be noted that the industry’s tendency toward supporting a myriad of small shops with little capitalization has well suited it for New York City, with its limited real estate. Small garment factories have been found in various neighborhoods at various times, stacked on top of one another in tenement apartments, in storefronts and lofts, and even in of- fice buildings. Despite its great aggregate size, then, the industry has often blended seamlessly, almost invisibly, into the cityscape. As economist Roy Helfgott noted, even the buildings of the famous midtown Garment District in its heyday looked much like office buildings, betraying little of what was happening inside.1 The apparel trade’s close ties with a succession of immigrant groups also helped make New York an especially good fit. Irish and Germans in the mid-nineteenth century, Jews and Italians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth, African-Americans and Puerto Ricans in the midtwentieth , and Chinese, Dominicans, and others at the turn of the twenty-first all supplied the cheap labor vital to the growth and survival of this low-wage industry. Some of these groups—in particular, Jews, Chinese, Dominicans, and Koreans—have also provided most of the industry ’s entrepreneurial initiative. Ethnic culture in New York City has therefore been intimately bound up with the garment industry, and the chapters in this book reflect this close connection. In their contributions to this book, Hadassa Kosak, Ramona Hernández, and Xiaolan Bao demonstrate just how embedded the experience and language of the needle trades became among Jews at the turn of the twentieth century, Dominicans at mid-century, and Chinese at the turn of the twenty-first century, respectively. Nancy Carnevale, in her chapter on Italian homeworkers, Introduction 5 argues that ethnic culture must also be recognized for its influence on the structure of the industry itself. The absence of large factories with smokestacks belching smoke has distinguished the garment industry from the common image of American manufacturing, and so has the fact that most clothing workers have been women. True, the ratio of women to men has been lower in New York...