Making the Clothes that Others Wear

MAKING THE CLOTHES that others wear is tiring, tedious, noisy work. A piece of clothing in a garment factory is divided into units of work: zippers, belts, seams, sleeves, button holes, facings. A worker performs one of these operations on an incomplete garment which is then passed to the next worker--until the piece is completed by six or seven people. At seven cents per zipper, a stitcher must put in over 36 zippers an hour to earn more than the International Ladies Garment Workers (ILG) Union minimum wage of $2.50.

She must work fast. In the morning the women smile; they age with the day. Every line deepens until, when a woman goes home, she looks and feels ten years older. In well-lit factories eyes squint and blur. The glaring electric light neutralizes everything.

Shop layout is determined by the needs of the garment-in-process: cutting tables (if any) are on one side, with piles of cut fabric ready to move down the line of stitchers. Work tables are separated, and all face in the same direction, making conversation impossible. Of course, you don't talk in a factory--you shout. The noise level in many Boston shops is just below the Federal maximum. For at least an hour after the work-day is over, the women continue shouting about the noise that they still hear.

But these shop conditions don't stop the women from joking. "Yes, we have a good boss. He allows us to take coffee breaks...on our own time." Another worker lampooned her boss's attitude in the bitter haggling over two and a half cents more for a difficult zipper: "Every day the boss tells us he's going out of business."

Most workers are paid by the piece, but sample workers, cutters, dividers, inspectors and a few others are paid by the hour. Piece workers resent the less pressured pace and casual attitude of those on time. "You can always tell if you see someone working at lunch--she's a piece worker." A piece worker is free to leave when she wishes. (Often there isn't enough work available.) The catch is that at 2/9 cents a piece, she must work at a terrific rate to earn a decent day's wage. Said one woman. "Piece work makes us like animals."

Time workers dislike the present wage system: "I'm making less now than I was five years ago," commented a Boston chairlady. She felt that the piece workers benefitted more than the time workers from the union-negotiated contracts. She complained to some union officials that her wages were comparatively lower now but, "They shut me up."

One chairlady is elected in each shop to hear and act on day-to-day grievances. She is expected to call in the union business agent, the union's representative to the employers, if she cannot resolve a problem with an employer. It is a frustrating and thankless job. Chairladies often feel powerless, and call in the business agent before taking any action. Then they blame the business agent's insensitivity to their complaints and his apparent friendliness with the employer.

AN ACTIVE MEMBER concerned with this problem maintained that when officials and business agents are asked "to forget about what they did for the last twenty years and how great it was, they consistently come through in a good union way. But," she said, "the union has a policy of not firing anyone, and they (the business agents) know that. It almost becomes a system of rewarding incompetence because the less you do the less there is to do."

Although 80 per cent of ILG members are female, women remain outside the union power structure. All of the officials and most of the business agents are men. The women point out that union meetings are often held after work when they must be home cooking dinner. They add that, with the exception of the Boston section of the Northeast Department, officials and business agents are appointed--by other men. One Boston business agent has a four-syllable explanation of this: "Ability."

It takes skill to put together an entire garment, which most of the women can do, but the "rat race" is doing the same job over and over. "You take an outsider that's never done it, they don't stop and realize what does go into making a garment...It is very interesting work and I like it. It's too bad sometimes that you feel a little inferior when you're in somebody's company. They don't stop and think. Is that all you do is work in a garment factory? Everything now is office, computers, banks. Very seldom do you talk about a garment factory. They look down upon a garment factory as, well, you don't know any better."

TWO LADIES STOOD near the window of the union headquarters on Harrison Avenue. When they speak about the future they speak of retirement. It doesn't matter whether you were in the trade from 16-40. At 62 you are eligible to collect the retirement pension but you must have worked at least 20 years, the last ten consecutively. "You grow with the shop."

The Chinese are new immigrants. A third of the Boston ILG population, most of the young Chinese women are inactive in the union. Sitting together in the shops behind an impenetrable barrier of language and custom, history repeats itself as the Americanized women look down on their 'foreign' fellow workers. "Things have changed. It used to be a nicer group, but now we have the Chinese people. When I first got here there were a lot of refined people...whereas now there are a lot of people who come to this country and that's the only thing they know. Their only way of life, especially in this area (Chinatown) is the garment business, because they haven't an education and can't compete for other jobs."

Except for the Chinese, most of the women have been in the business for at least 20 years. They work on old machines in ancient buildings. Their greatest anticipation is travelling after retirement. The bosses are old, too--younger men are not interested in the garment trade. "Even their sons don't want it." The union seems out of touch with its members and unwilling to organize its resources to meet a changing and probably depressed future. This year's resugence in the industry has lulled the union into a confidence that business will go on as usual. Without the union the women know that things would be "terrible." But the union can only go so far and then it stops short. You've just got to go and complain a lot. We don't get it from the husbands, might as well from the boss."

Women have always worked. Traditionally, countless women labored in the home to meet family clothing needs. While the advent of the machine altered these domestic origins, handwork remains essential to the manufacturing process.

The first hands in the ladies garment industry were Jewish and Italian immigrants. In return for long hours in overcrowded sweatshops, these men and women might earn enough to survive. When wages in the needle trades declined in relation to other jobs, women workers began to outnumber the men. (Presently men are employed as cutters and pressers, where the pay is higher.)

It was a hard struggle to organize people separated by language and competing for poor jobs. The International Ladies Garment Workers Union was forged out of a Jewish socialist tradition among the workers. Throughout its 73-year history, the I.L.G. has concentrated on establishing a 'protocol' for arbitration of future management-labor disputes, turning to strikes only as a last resort.

At one time it was a good business to go into, from the employers' viewpoint. Today the only way to make substantial profits is by owning factories in a foreign country (e.g. Japan) or at a lower return, by operating out of the South and Southwest (e.g. Farah Pants, Blauer Manufacturing Co.).