Contents History > The Evolution of a Garment
-- How the Sweatshop System Worked > Roles within the Tenement
Sweatshop > Seasonality in the Garment Industry > Contemporary
Sweatshops > Triangle Shirtwaist FactoryThe 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.
