Much-Needed Change May Finally Be Starting
If you take people off welfare, what jobs do you have for them? That’s a timely question, and one part of the answer lies in the garment industry.
Ultimately that’s why the government has made so many public attempts--some successful, some less so--to crack down on illegal sweatshop contractors in the United States and the Third World.
The highly publicized exposure of the sweatshop origins of the Kathie Lee Gifford clothing line really had less to do with condemning the hapless Gifford than calling attention to the fact that Wal-Mart, Walt Disney and other major retailers were tolerating sordid conditions in order to bring low-priced clothing to U.S. consumers.
Now that publicity has been carried to the highest level. President Clinton held a White House meeting Friday with Gifford and representatives of Nike, Liz Claiborne, L.L. Bean, Warnaco and other apparel makers and retailers. “The companies gathered here have agreed to take additional steps to ensure that the products they make and sell are manufactured under decent and humane working conditions,” the president announced.
Practical economics are behind the actions of Clinton and the Labor Department in accelerating crackdowns over the last four years.
The idea is to help the U.S. garment industry flourish again and be able to give entry-level jobs to the less skilled--including many among the 14 million who will be forced to find work as welfare funds become more restricted. If that is to happen, illegal and severely low-wage competition has to be restrained.
Of course, one reason retailers buy from sweatshops is that consumers like low prices. And to most consumers the fact that the number of U.S. garment workers has fallen by 30% in the last decade, from roughly 1.2 million to 853,000 nationally, doesn’t mean much.
Indeed they regard garment making as a Third-World activity, whether it’s in downtown Los Angeles or the jungles of Guatemala. But that attitude is wrong and needs to change, says Manuel Burgess, president of Trinity Knitwear, a Los Angeles sportswear maker.
Burgess, 47, exemplifies the possibilities in a traditional, low-wage industry. Born in Santa Monica to Mexican immigrants, he came to work for his company, then called Drasin Mills, 24 years ago after high school and four years in the Air Force.
Starting in the cutting room, he rose quickly to plant manager and then president of the company under the original owners, Ed Drasin and Hy Dichter.
Now those owners are retiring and Burgess is acquiring an ownership interest through a loan from the Los Angeles Community Development Bank, the public-private partnership backed by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the city and county of Los Angeles, and private lenders.
Burgess will remain head of the company in partnership with George Akers, head of O Wear, a firm that makes environmentally friendly clothing from organic cotton and recycled polyester from plastic pop bottles. Akers is a 30-year veteran of the garment business who believes the industry is entering better days.
Burgess agrees. “They call this a Third World industry, but it’s not,” he says. “We have longtime employees here who have raised families. They get paid vacations, which is not common in this industry.”
But illegal activity hurts by taking 25% of the business in his area, Burgess estimates. And Third World production, with 30-cent-an-hour labor, compared to his company’s $6 to $7 an hour minimum, makes competition difficult.
“Their [total] costs are 50% lower, so I can’t compete,” Burgess says.
But if the playing field could be leveled even somewhat and he could get a big order from a retailer, he would take a look at new machinery to increase production and employment. “Machinery has to be amortized, so I need larger orders and stable orders that can’t be canceled on short notice,” Burgess says.
In recent years, such orders have completely dried up for small garment makers. Apparel manufacturing--an industry of more than 20,000 companies, down 4,000 from a decade ago--has been hurt by a loss of customers.
Clothing manufacturers used to call on hundreds of dress shops and menswear stores in major cities. But in recent years, the major retail chains--Wal-Mart, J.C. Penney, Federated, May and Dayton-Hudson--have grown dominant as never before.
Such companies have central buying offices “that patch you in on closed-circuit television and you make a bid for 1,500 stores,” says one sales representative.
But they have made it a tougher business for the small garment producer. “They’ll give you an order for 12,000 pieces, and if the garment sells quickly the follow-up order for 100,000 will go to Honduras or Zimbabwe or wherever they can get it produced most cheaply,” says George Rudes, owner of St. Germain, a Los Angeles producer of women’s wear.
That pattern may not be broken quickly. But by giving retailers good publicity in the White House and bad publicity on sweatshops in Honduras, the Clinton administration may persuade and pressure the store chains to give more orders to domestic suppliers.
Also, real change could be underway. Technological advances are coming to the garment industry--computer-guided sewing machines, laser cutters and the like. And two programs funded by the Defense Department are introducing the machinery through Clemson University in South Carolina and Cal Poly Pomona here.
Such centers are in the great tradition of the agricultural and mechanical universities and extension services that for more than a century have brought government-backed teaching help to farmers and manufacturers.
“We will demonstrate for manufacturers how the technology can pay off for their business,” says Jean Gipe, head of the Apparel Technology Center at Cal Poly Pomona, which opens this fall thanks to a $12.5-million grant from the Defense Department. Manny Burgess and Trinity Knitwear might be one of her first clients.
Clearly, with the full force of the U.S. government--White House, Labor Department, Defense Department and HUD--working to improve the garment business, something is happening that’s much larger than the embarrassment of Kathie Lee.
