Garment Industry Joke

A garment worker was walking back from her lunch break to her job sewing in a factory in the garment district.

From out of a doorway jumps a man wearing nothing but a raincoat.  He steps in the front of the woman, throws open his coat, and exposes himself to her.

She looks at him and says, "You call that a lining?" 

Clearing up after dinner Monday night, I finally sat down on the couch, intending to stay for only a moment before putting away a pile of laundry, when the HBO documentary "Schmatta: Rags to Riches to Rags" began, and I was hopelessly hooked for the next hour-and-a-quarter.  (The word "schmatta" is Yiddish for "rags", and the term was used for many years to refer to the garment industry.)

This documentary, directed by Marc Levin, focuses on a small part of Manhattan centered on 7th Avenue south of 42nd Street, that concentrated area  of shops, showrooms and factories known as the garment district, which at one time was the largest employer in New York City.  Archival footage shows city streets bustling with people, carts full of fabric, and briskly rolling racks of dresses, coats and blouses.

Serving more or less as "bookends" to the film are two separate tragedies, almost a century apart, which illustrate that we haven't learned much of anything along the way, and seem destined to keep perpetuating our most senseless policies when it comes to workers, to the detriment of our economy as a whole.

Early in the 20th century, waves of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe arrived in New York City and went to work in American sweatshops, cutting and sewing clothes.  The conditions were deplorable, the pay even worse.  People were living a dozen to a room with no heat and no running water.

On March 25, 1911, a fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, which occupied the 8th, 9th and 10th floors of the Asch Building, located east of Washington Square.  When Triangle employees, most of whom were young immigrant women, tried to escape they found at least one exit door locked, and the one elevator in the  building no longer working.  The single exterior fire escape tore away from the building and crashed to the ground.  Many young women saw no other way out - they jumped.

Girls with names like Gussie and Ida and Giuseppa and Esther and Nettie and Annie and Sonia.  They jumped. 

In the end 146 people died.  It remained the worst workplace disaster in New York City until September 11, 2001.  (In my opinion, it is still the worst disaster, in that it was perpetrated by Americans.)

The fire helped to further galvanize an already active labor movement, and the garment industry became one of the first industries in the U.S. to become unionized, helping to create a diverse and prosperous middle class.  One of the commentators in the documentary remarks that many of today's doctors, lawyers, politicians, and even a Supreme Court Justice or two are but one generation removed from the garment industry.  That is the American dream.

The documentary features interviews with the elderly children of the labor movement's most visionary leaders (such as Sidney Hillman and Jacob Potofsky), as well as  some of the workers who were able to raise their families on jobs in the garment business, as cutters, sewers and designers, and then chronicles the beginning of the end of this vibrant industry.   

In 1965, 95% of the clothing worn in America was made in America.

Today, 5% of the clothing worn in America is made in America. 

Things started to change in the 1960's (right around the time of "Mad Men"), when the Kennedy administration allowed for 4% of clothing to be manufactured outside of the United States.  The trend continued under Democratic and Republican administrations alike, coming to full fruition with the signing of NAFTA under Bill Clinton.  (In a clip, we see Clinton extolling the virtues of NAFTA, saying that it will protect the American middle class, while creating a middle class in other countries.  Sadly - and predictably - it has done neither.)

In addition to globalization, the relentless reach for ever-higher profits has driven virtually everyone in the United States out of the actual manufacture of clothing. One man comments that it is not for lack of trying hard enough that he doesn't have any work, but it is because he has been pushed out, his job exported overseas.  One husband and wife team, owners of one of the few remaining trim factories in New York City, comment that no one here wants to make anything anymore - people only want to broker.

Designer Sigrid Olsen talks about her start in the industry, saying that it was creative and collaborative, and made jobs for people.  However, when her brand was acquired by Liz Claiborne in 1999, she recalls attending a meeting and being given expected growth goals, and wondering how that could possibly be achieved.  (In fact, she basically says that any publicly-traded company is going to be put in this position:  grow, grow, grow.)

Well, it's no surprise that the way this is achieved is what we have now come to know as "the race to the bottom".  More aggressive marketing and increased sales can only go so far - there is a limit to the amount of product people can buy.  So, the only other way to increase profits is to cut the cost of making the product.  You take the jobs away from honest, hard working, middle class Americans, and you ship those jobs to India or China or Pakistan - where I'm sure that people are every bit as honest and hard working, but where there are no protections in place that prevent a corporation from exploiting the workers who desperately need to survive. In other words, you've gone back to the way America was at the beginning of the 20th century.

Now that's progress! 

Anyone who says that this situation can be blamed on unions is either willfully ignorant of the way that a "global economy" actually works, or is completely indoctrinated with anti-labor propaganda.  Union workers didn't get rich - they simply earned a fair living.  Even Irving Rousso, founder of the clothing company "Russ Togs", as bellicose and hard-nosed a  businessman as you could find anywhere, doesn't begrudge the unions in this documentary. Although he didn't like them, he knew that they were doing what they had to do, and he was doing what he had to do. He coexisted with them, his company thrived, and he made millions.

I was also happy to see that the documentary used this old PSA from the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (or at least, one version of it) from the 1970's.  I remember seeing this as a kid, and the song has stayed with me all this time.