Garment Industry

Sweatshops

• History
  
• The Evolution of a Garment - How the Sweatshop System Worked
  
• Roles within the Tenement Sweatshop
  
• Seasonality in the Garment Industry
  
• Contemporary Sweatshops

History
History In 1888, New York state factory inspectors provided the following description of sweat-shops: "In New York city, in the tenement house districts where clothing is manufactured, there exists a system of labor which is nearly akin to slavery as it is possible to get. The work is done under the eyes of task-masters, who rent a small room or two in the rear part of an upper floor of a high building, put in a few sewing machines, a stove suitable for heating irons, and then hire a number of men and women to work for them." Explicit in the inspectors' definition of a sweatshop is the exploitation of garment workers by contractors, who forced their workers to labor for long hours only to be paid insufficient wages. In addition to physically sweating as a result of their toil, workers were also "sweated" in the same manner an animal would be milked or bled.

By the 1880s, for the most part, seamstresses no longer negotiated work on an individual basis but were subsumed into a system of contracting. Contractors received components of garments that they in turn assembled according to designs. These finished products were returned to the manufacturers and marketed under the company's label. As a result, manufacturers distanced themselves from the hiring and equipping of a labor force, which became the responsibility of the contractor. Manufacturers paid a set price for each finished garment they received from the contractor, which was considerably lower then they would then charge retail. Consequently, contractors, in order to make any profit, forced longer hours and lower wages on their workers.

Contractors, more often than not, exploited fellow immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe by using social networks and common dialects to hire their labor force. In many instances, a sweatshop would be staffed by workers who all came to America from the same hometown in Europe. The exploitation of the contractor, in his own mind, was justified by the fact that he himself felt exploited by the manufacturers. Furthermore, many new immigrants were willing to take any job offered to them at all, particularly during the economic hardships of the 1890s (See Depression of 1893). The line that contractors straddled between being helpful employers and ruthless exploiter to their fellow countrymen was indeed thin, and varied from shop to shop.

Because the equipment necessary for making garments was not cumbersome, most contractors based their sweatshops out of the tenement apartments in which they lived with their family. Within the Lower East Side, there was no pattern as to where one would find a garment sweatshop. Research shows that in one year shops were in existence in tenements along Delancey, Sheriff, Division, Hester, Essex, Ridge, Cherry, Ludlow, Monroe, Mulberry, Mott, Baxter, Pitt, Rivington, Suffolk, Norfolk, Canal, Henry, Cannon, Stanton, East Houston, Attorney, Allen, Eldridge, Bayard, Chrystie, Orchard (No. 180, in addition to 97), Willett, Jefferson, Columbia, Clinton and Madison streets. The shop was run as a family affair. The wife of the contractor would help out by cooking meals (for which the workers had to pay) and attending to other tasks. Everything in the shop served both a domestic and business purpose. Stoves used to heat irons were also used to cook meals. The average sweatshop employed anywhere from four to 30 employees.

In 1904, the opening of the New York City subway system and other transportation networks allowed the garment industry to move uptown, and to consolidate workers in more factories. Although sweatshops in tenements remained, factories, such as the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory (see Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire) provided more consistent employment.

The Evolution of a Garment - How the Sweatshop System Worked
Although certain retailers employed "inside" shops, which eliminated contractors and paid sewing machine operators and other workers at a piece-rate to work directly for them, most retailers relied on the system of using "outside" shops organized by contractors.

Typically, a designer, either independent or working for a retailer, would design a garment based on the latest fashions (particularly within the women's clothing industry). Cotton, harvested by underpaid sharecroppers (usually freed African-American slaves and poor Southern whites, who lived in a type of veritable slavery where wages and rent were always manipulated to keep them in debt) was shipped to the giant textile mills of New England and the mid-Atlantic. Textile workers, often poor, underpaid immigrants working their own long hours, converted the fiber into fabric.

Retailers purchased the fabric from the mills, and redistributed the material to a cutting contractor, who would be paid a piece-rate to cut the material into the garment design. Upon receiving the cut designs, the retailer would re-contract the material, this time to a sewing contractor (i.e. Harris Levine). Often the system of contracting was highly diversified with each sweatshop performing a specialized task. A single clothing firm might employ as many as 75 different contractors to work on their clothing line.

Roles within the Tenement Sweatshop

• Sewing Machine Operator - Might have experience working as a tailor in Europe, almost always a man. Often the operator was the contractor himself, who employed the workers in the sweatshop.
  
• Baster - Prepared the garments for the operator by fitting the pieces together.
  
• Finisher - Responsible for adding the finishing touches to the garment by hand; mostly women in teens and early 20s. Because the finisher was often the only woman in the sweatshop, she might suffer sexual harassment from her male co-workers. As a result, many preferred to work with predominantly women workforces in factories or to get married and leave the shop.
  
• Presser - Always a male as he had to lift the heavy irons, which weighed up to 20 pounds. Usually an elderly male. First person accounts from workers in the sweatshops cite that many of the pressers were Orthodox Jews.