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Sweatshops
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 Factory
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 also: Triangle Shirtwaist
Factory Fire provided more consistent employment.
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