Our Voices, Our Histories by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC043000 Social Science / Ethnic Studies / Asian American Studies
Publisher: NYU Press

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The garment industry has cycled through many changes over the years. Since the mid-1800s immigrants were a critical necessity for its development in New York City. The workforce changed from Eastern European immigrants in the 1880s to today’s Asians and Latinos. Equally significant is the shift in the workforce from men to women as the industry became more mechanized. In addition, some ethnic group members transitioned from worker to owner, utilizing coethnics as their labor force. Immigrant women, however, were the strength of the industry. As early as the 1890s, there were Jewish “shops” housed in tenement buildings. The more enterprising of the first Eastern European Jews became contractors and hired members of their families or coethnic acquaintances from the old country.2 Coethnic owners and workers had their own set of tensions, as their relationship might be simultaneously beneficial and exploitative. Many Jewish women left the industry when homework was outlawed;3 Jewish employers instead hired Italian women who were readily available to work outside their homes. They quickly became the second-largest group in the garment industry.4

Manufacturers hired workers with fewer skills, including more sewers from different ethnic backgrounds, after adopting a Fordist production assembly-line model that divided the process of sewing a garment into separate tasks. Employers started to recruit differently, such as in newspapers, rather than by word of mouth through coethnic friends and relatives.5 This changed the industry’s character as it no longer depended on a coethnic workforce.

After World War II, shortages of Jewish and Italian workers created opportunities for members of nonwhite ethnic groups and American-born racial minority groups, including blacks, Puerto Ricans, and some Chinese Americans. The apparel industry was secure, well paying, for the most part unionized, and often the only industry that would hire members from these groups. Even though garment manufacturing as a whole was declining in the United States and New York City, the departure of Jews and Italians, and then blacks and Puerto Ricans (when the civil rights movement created better opportunities for them), still left plenty of work for Chinese, Koreans, and Latinos.

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