Shoemaking Firms Fight to Survive : L.A. Companies Lobbying for Import Quotas to Save Jobs
The piecework is stacked close by. Neither hand moves more than four inches to the side as the material is picked up, worked on close in front of the body and then put off to the side. In concert, back and forth, each hand alternates in synchronized movement as a new piece is grabbed and seconds later is gone--the work performed so rapidly that it seems incidental. And every hundredth time a finished piece is passed to the side, the factory worker earns another dollar--maybe.
In back rooms of the couple of dozen shoe manufacturers in Los Angeles, hundreds of workers crouch silently over machines or work tables, performing one of the hundred or so operations that go into making one shoe--cutting, stitching, folding, trimming, hammering. The husky scent of leather is barely discernible among the smells of glues and cements and machine oils that permeate the noisy, cramped work areas.
Fewer Firms Each Year
Each year there are fewer of them. At the Gardena Shoe Factory, there are about 200 piecework employees--a third less than peak operating capacity--all working four-day weeks. Whereas the plant made 3,000 pairs of shoes a day last year, it now turns out only 1,800.
The Gardena plant could be gone in one or two years, says Arthur Hirshberg, who runs it for Desco Shoe Corp., its New York-based parent. Employment among shoemakers in the Los Angeles area, which account for about 10% of the country’s total shoe production, has dropped below 1,500 from its one-time peak of more than 4,200.
The companies that are left, and myriad companies that supply them, are supporting national lobbying efforts on behalf of import quotas proposed by the International Trade Commission. President Reagan has until Sept. 1 to act on the recommendations, which would limit imports of shoes priced above $2.50 to 447 million pairs a year for the first two years. In 1984, about 550 million pairs in that price category were imported.
That, according to Murray H. Finley, president of the Amalgamated Clothing & Textile Workers Union, which represents about 20,000 shoe workers nationwide, would give domestic shoe companies sales of another 100 million pairs a year and restore 30,000 jobs to the industry.
The fight against imports, which so far this year have accounted for about 77% of all U.S. shoe sales, has galvanized the country’s shoemakers as never before and has united the manufacturers and their mostly unionized employees, often in opposition to the retailers who oppose protectionist quotas.
Snubbed by East Coast, Midwestern Firms
Shoemaking has a venerable history in the Eastern part of the country, with New England dominating the industry and St. Louis a strong second. By comparison, the West Coast shoe manufacturing business is in its infancy.
For their first several decades, Los Angeles area shoemakers were snubbed by the established East Coast and Midwestern companies. The first shoemaking enterprises in Los Angeles were begun to support the film industry, according to Mike Boehm, who has been designing shoes in Los Angeles since 1951.
One of Los Angeles’ first shoemakers was Harry Sobel, whose ventures were the predecessor for Sobel, Bernstein & Greene, one of L.A.’s largest shoe manufacturing companies.
Harry Sobel and others began supplying custom-made shoes to the movie makers--satin slippers for the movie queens and clogs and wedgies for Carmen Miranda. As the shoes caught on with movie moguls’ wives and daughters, the shoemakers expanded, drawing from a healthy supply of relatively inexpensive labor from Mexico and Central America.
The shoe shops were made into factories. “They didn’t make very good shoes. . . . They made funky kinds of shoes that wouldn’t sell in New York,” said Boehm, who has worked for Sobel, Bernstein & Greene since selling his own shop to the company in 1958.
Los Angeles shoemakers were ignored until the 1940s, when their jeweled flats became popular even on the East Coast. During World War II, when most leather was being made into military shoes and boots, the Hollywood influence paid off for West Coast shoemakers.
Shoemakers “in California were used to making shoe out of non-traditional materials, like cloth, for the movies. So they began making shoes out of canvas, sailcloth, whatever they could get that wasn’t rationed,” Boehm said.
It wasn’t until the late 1950s, however, that West Coast shoemakers began expanding from their ubiquitous sandals into the pumps and dress-shoe styles that are the mainstay of the shoe business. Those who didn’t make the transformation were among the first victims of imports, he said.
Today, the companies still mostly employ Latinos because Latin American countries are among the few places in the world where shoemaking is still being taught, said Andre Christofer of the Sobel firm.
His company, which makes women’s dress shoes that retail for $72 and up, now employs about 385 workers, down from its peak of 565. Christofer, a native of Lyon, France, who learned shoemaking in Europe, believes that quotas and automation are essential if domestic shoemakers are going to survive the foreign competition.
Even union representatives agree that the machines, some of which help push the piecework from one worker to the next, are necessary--even agreeable.
“We are not worrying about the machines,” said Enrique Saucedo, an Amalgamated Clothing & Textile Workers Union representative for Los Angeles-area shoe workers. “We are worried about the imports.”
