Common Threads in the Rag Trade
Work--work--work
Till the brain begins to swim
Work--work--work
Till the eyes are heavy and dim!
Seam, and gusset, and band,
Band, and gusset, and seam,
Till over the buttons I fall asleep,
And sew them on in a dream.
*
Thomas Hood wrote his poem in an England transformed by the Industrial Revolution; it altered the unchanged centuries of city and village, reordered labor and leisure, family, factory and farm.
I write this, two-and-a-half hundred years later, in an America being transformed by an information revolution, and by international trade that promises to move across borders like the unimpeded wind.
And that, too, will change us, is changing us already.
Capital--money--moves where it will; labor cannot travel so swiftly, and so capital seeks it out, for the best work at the lowest feasible price. Some San Francisco labor leader quoted Thomas Jefferson, “Merchants have no soil of their own. They go where the profits are.”
UNITE, the nation’s largest garment workers union, vs. Guess, the largest apparel maker in Los Angeles, the nation’s second-largest apparel manufacturing city, is a cautionary tale.
*
The women of Common Threads, whose progenitors marched for suffrage, for fair wages, for peace, organized the Sunday afternoon poetry reading and rally, and they are very like the bookstore where they gathered. Santa Monica’s Midnight Special is earnest about good causes, and solemn in its earnestness. On these shelves, Rigoberta Menchu will always get better display than Tom Clancy.
Throughout the readings, two women in red T-shirts sat, occasionally leaning toward the interpreter for a translation when the audience laughed at some sally. Among this lean and lively crowd, these women were broad-backed and stolid, waiting to say their piece.
It was an event similar to this last fall for which Guess sued Common Threads and UNITE for libel and slander against its good name. And what Hilda in her red T-shirt had to say was not unlike what had been said before: that in her years of work for a contractor that did jobs for Guess, she had never gotten minimum wage, never gotten vacations or medical insurance or overtime. . . .
Guess disputes such claims and others about underpaid piece work and illegal homework (this, in an age when white-collar workers are trying to be able to work at home).
UNITE is the sturdiest of the rag trade unions, heir to the unpronounceable ILGWU (Remember “Look for the union label”?); it very much wants a foothold in L.A.’s garment industry. Its picketers at Guess Beverly Hills have been so relentless they were fined twice.
But Guess is no fledgling either--the multimillion-dollar firm, whose label is so profitable that it is a favorite among counterfeiters, has a reputation for litigiousness.
Some years ago, after government inspectors found problems with Guess sewing contractors, the firm pledged to be an industry role model, policing its own contractors for sweatshop transgressions. Now it is the only firm in the Labor Department’s gold-star “Trendsetter” list ever to be put on probation.
No cause-effect in any of this, the company says, but it will henceforth be turning to Mexico and South America for a good deal of its sewing work. In this, it follows a deeply trodden path. Price Pfister, the third-biggest faucet maker, laid off men in Pacoima and hired others in Mexicali. Oshkosh overalls are no longer made in their namesake Wisconsin town. It is the price of staying in business: Compete cheaper, or die.
There will always be someone poorer, someone willing to work for less than the man who came before him, and always some company willing to balance the risk against the profit. Even now, Mexico is said to be complaining of losing jobs to lower-wage workers in Indonesia.
As Hood put it:
O God! That bread should be so dear,
And flesh and blood so cheap.
*
Ours is a dollar democracy. Every buck we spend is like a vote. When we buy shoes made in China, are we unwittingly voting for political prisoner slave labor? Is a bargain-priced silk shirt from Bangladesh a dollar vote for child labor? In our race for the most and the cheapest, are we running our own race to the bottom?
I favor--let’s call it the Kathie Lee Gifford labeling law. If we can label a can of tuna for fat, calories, sodium, spring water or oil, dolphin-safe or not, why not shoes, jeans? Is it made where workers earn in a day what we earn in an hour? And how much--or what percentage--for labor, for advertising, packaging, overhead, capital investment, for profit?
Our kids are already ahead of us in this: Some San Fernando Valley students began boycotting Pakistani-made soccer balls after finding that children were making them.
It’s your buck. It has to stop somewhere.
