Threads: Gender, Labor, and Power in the Global Apparel Industry

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TRACING THE THREADS OF A GLOBAL INDUSTRY

If, as Marx defined them, commodities are the containers of hidden social relationships, certainly these social relationships are all the more concealed by the movement of production to the Third World.

—SUSAN WILLIS, A PRIMER FOR DAILY LIFE¹

Workers in a Global Labor Market

In the United States in the late 1990s and the early years of the twenty-first century, sweatshops were national news. The press reported that a factory in El Monte, California, making clothing for major corporations held immigrant Thai workers in slavery.² It covered the arrest of a garment shop manager in New York City’s Chinatown whose employees were laboring twenty-hour shifts, seven days a week.³ News stories from Seattle, New York, and Washington, D.C., showed streets filled with people protesting corporate profit derived from sweatshops. Student, labor, and religious groups organized boycotts of name brands associated with sweatshop conditions. The papers reported on sit-ins at administration buildings on college campuses, where students demanded that clothing bearing their schools’ logos be produced under humane working conditions. The abysmal workplaces and poor wages that drew so much attention were not just a problem of factories on far-off shores; they were occurring in the United States as well. Contradicting the industrialized world’s belief that its economies were different, a proliferation of sweatshops in developing nations appeared to coincide with the increased number and declining conditions of such factories in the United States and Europe as well.⁴

This trend, which linked the fate of workers in industrialized and developing countries, had been documented by several academic observers. As early as 1983, an anthropologist studying garment factories in Mexico noted that the expansion of the industry there paralleled the resurgence of so-called sweatshops in metropolitan countries.⁵ Seventeen years later, the incidence of sweatshops in Los Angeles had grown to alarming proportions. In writing about the growth of sweated labor in that city, sociologists Edna Bonacich and Richard Appelbaum argued that it needed to be understood as part of the restructuring of global capitalism and as linked to the increased exploitation of workers in the Third World.⁶ These accounts stressed that the livelihoods of immigrant workers in U.S. cities, of rural workers in economically threatened factories of the southern United States, and of women and men laboring in export processing zones of developing nations were all linked to the fate of the same rapidly changing industries, an insight that challenges the boundaries of our time-honored concepts of national or community development.

That the growth of sweatshops in the United States and their growth abroad were interrelated was brought home to me in a vivid way as I conducted research for this book in a southern Virginia knitting mill in 1999. At a meeting of local 1994 of the garment workers’ union UNITE, visibly angry workers described managers’ attempts to increase the variety and complexity of tasks they were expected to perform under piece rate. They complained of ineffective grievance procedures and of union leaders so afraid of plant closure that they would not pressure management on the issue. One young African American man recalled the day in 1993 when 120 workers from the plant traveled to Washington, D.C. They visited members of Congress to encourage them to support legislation banning imports from sweatshops in the developing world. We went to Washington to protest sweatshops, he said. But third-floor knitting is a sweatshop now. Both the workers’ collective trip to Washington and this man’s assessment of his job situation reflected an understanding that the forces that caused firms to establish low-wage enclaves of garment production overseas were also undermining the conditions and security of jobs in Virginia.

Just one year later, a worker at a Mexican apparel factory told a similar story of intensification of the routines of work. She said that her employer, a Korean company that produced athletic apparel for some of the world’s biggest brands, had raised workers’ quotas from 3,000 to 3,600 pieces a week. Managers marked each worker’s progress toward the quota on a graph above the person’s station. The pressure to make these quotas while doing work that met quality standards was causing burnout within a very short time. This inspector said, I could work here for perhaps two years before being exhausted, but the sewing operators get more pressure on them, so they can’t stay as long. She explained the relation of the speedup to the global scope of the apparel labor market. When people slow down or complain, she said, the manager tells us that the workers in their Indonesian plant get paid much less and work harder.⁷

In response to situations like these, many people have called for transnational organizing. Bruce Raynor, the president of UNITE, argues that the connections between the international unions and American unions need to be close and that eventually you may have to organize and negotiate on a world-wide basis.⁸ William Greider, Kim Moody, and other popular writers have criticized analyses that pit the interests of older, more prosperous workers in the United States against those of newly recruited, poorer workers in the developing world, arguing that the fates of workers at the top and the bottom of the ladder are interrelated.⁹ Such organizing efforts are made difficult, however, by the real competition among groups of workers to secure and retain the rapidly shifting jobs of the new economy. Transnational organizing that transcends protectionist impulses requires a clear understanding of the economic forces that sometimes link workers’ interests and sometimes divide them, a willingness to consider long-run as well as short-run impacts, and a politically grounded analysis of the ways firms use and benefit from competition among workers.

Too often, calls for transnational labor solidarity treat workers as generic beings, without gender or ethnicity. When the newspapers report job loss in the United States, we tend to think of white men in hard hats receiving the pink slips. When we hear about the movement of jobs to Mexico or China, we tend to think of new industries with new male workers. In some cases this is a true picture, but as Jefferson Cowie has noted, the fact that women are often the first to be hired into assembly work and are often the most disposable workers in the chain of production places them at the heart of the story of both industrialization and deindustrialization.¹⁰ Not only are women workers in the majority in the world’s new export assembly zones, but ideologies of gender and ethnicity are crucial to the political strategies through which employers recruit and administer a low-cost, efficient, and orderly labor force. In the global labor market, women continue to be paid according to prevailing gender ideologies that assume they live with husbands or fathers who help support them. They continue to be exhorted to be good girls whose productivity sustains both the family and the nation."¹¹ These ideologies and practices are central to the construction of the labor market and the organization of work wherever it takes place.

Apparel workers participate in an industry whose labor market has become interconnected—where workers in different parts of the world find themselves competing to perform the same operations for the same firms. Such a claim is not merely hyperbolic. By the turn of the twenty-first century, the vast majority of apparel firms could effectively locate, or subcontract, their production in just about any part of the world. As one industry executive told a trade press publication in 1999, There’s no difference in manufacturing in North Carolina or El Salvador: it’s the same everything except the cost of labor.¹²

Scholarly attempts to account for such global connection have been characterized by what Karel Williams has called the slow death through a thousand qualifications about the global, the local and their interpenetration.¹³ The ink spilled on this problem is not just a compulsion to repeat platitudes, however; it is a reflection of the awkwardness of our paradigms and concepts when we try to grasp phenomena of broad scope as they play themselves out in local environments. There is no single framework that allows us to integrate an understanding of labor struggles as they unfold on the ground with the financial imperative for firms to deliver not just higher rates of return, but consistently rising share prices. As apparel firms seek what David Harvey has called their spatial fix,¹⁴ they are looking for cheap and controllable labor, but they must incorporate that consideration within a complex equation that includes transport costs, speed of delivery, distribution channels, import rules, fashion cycles, branding strategies, profit levels, and share prices. For workers in the industry, the equation includes the structure of local labor markets, social reproductive needs and choices, gender roles, racial hierarchies, job characteristics, and the evaluation of those characteristics within locally evolved moral economies of work. The shop floor is where these two equations intersect. All of this takes place within the context of national and international governance and the institutions that coordinate labor and business.

The art critic and essayist John Berger has written about the problems of grappling with complex entities and our difficulty, in the late modern period, in telling any story sequentially as if it were simply unfolding in time. This is because, he observed, we are too aware of what is continually traversing the storyline laterally. That is to say, instead of being aware of a point as an infinitely small part of a straight line, we are aware of it as an infinitely small part of an infinite number of lines, as the center of a star of lines.¹⁵ The apparel labor market is at the center of a star of lines that traverse Wall Street and Madison Avenue, Mexico City, Ciudad Juárez, Djakarta, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. Choosing sites for investigation and telling meaningful stories about dynamics requires both a theory of global economic change and a grasp of the commodity chain through which clothing is produced and distributed. Studying it requires us to track the social relations of apparel production as these are restructured by local and global forces and enacted by employers and workers within their disparate and shared frameworks of meaning and power.

The Apparel Industry as Part of a Global Economy

Much social science writing about the global economy recalls the story of the blind men and the elephant. For whoever is investigating the trunk, it is all trunks, and for whoever has the tail, it is all tails. This is the point made by Walden Bello in his critique of Naomi Klein’s No Logo.¹⁶ Klein’s book is a fascinating expose of the ways that large firms use branded marketing strategies to create new markets, drive out competitors, and change the rules of the game in corporate competition. She also shows how the branding of everything changes consumer culture and factory working conditions. But as Bello points out, Klein’s analysis does not hold true for every kind of manufacturing, and it is not an accurate portrayal of the global economy as a whole. While it does a good job of describing the dynamics of industries that sell consumer products and services, its insights do not apply to high technology and knowledge-intensive industries or to the production of inputs (like steel or oil) or machinery. More significantly, it ignores the role of finance and new forms of financial speculation in driving investment decisions.

A study of the apparel industry provides a very specific piece of the elephant, or the globalization picture. Like the consumer products industries Klein describes, apparel is what Gary Gereffi has called a buyer-driven commodity chain. This means that retailers and merchandisers play the leading role in setting up production networks. The dynamics of the apparel industry are different from those of producer-driven chains like automobiles, aircraft, and machinery. In these industries, the administrative headquarters of the producing firm organizes the production chain’s backward and forward linkages.¹⁷ This is a significant distinction because it tells us where the greatest power lies within the industry and which actors are shaping trends.

Another distinctive feature of the apparel industry is its historically low levels of concentration. That is, it has been made up of many small firms that were often family owned. As late as 1987, the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment noted that the industry came close to representing a situation of perfect competition because of the large number of small companies it encompassed.¹⁸ This situation began to change in the 1990s as concentration became a fact of life in the once fragmented . . . industry.¹⁹ Corporate mergers and an expansion of productive capacity through subcontracting fueled a trend toward fewer and larger firms over the