Schmatta: Another name for a dying industry

When was the last time you bought a piece of clothing that was made in America? You'd have to look long and hard before finding any these days, yet it wasn’t long ago that we all wore clothing made in the U.S.A. In 1995, half of America’s clothing was made here at home, and going back forty-five years, almost all of our clothing was. Today, only five percent of American clothing is made in the U.S.

It takes a lot of workers to clothe America. What happened to all of those jobs?

The fascinating new HBO film, Schmatta, Rags to Riches to Rags, takes a look at the rise and decline of the New York garment industry, once a backbone of the city's economy and a source of plentiful, good-paying jobs. According to the film, in the early 1900s, the garment industry provided hundreds of thousands of European immigrants with meaningful work which allowed them to become a part of the growing middle class. The work of garment industry labor groups such as the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union strengthened the national labor movement.

Bruce Raynor, president of the Workers United SEIU, tells Schmatta viewers that:

It was the lifting of those workers in manufacturing from poverty to working class that revolutionized America.

Early American garment industry workers were upwardly mobile. They moved from lower class to middle class and their paychecks helped fuel the economy. Their experience demonstrates that when people are employed in a healthy industry, and when they have union-negotiated rights and benefits at work, they feel more financially secure and are more likely to spend and invest their money.

We aren't in that situation right now. As October’s consumer confidence data illustrates, with a new recession high of 10.2% unemployment, Americans don't feel secure enough in their jobs to purchase big-ticket items such as cars and homes, thus preventing the economy from rebounding. Job security is a cornerstone of a healthy economy, especially one as driven by consumer spending as ours is.

The garment industry is not only made up of cutters and sewers. When the industry was thriving, there were abundant jobs for skilled workers in sales, purchasing, design, accounting and management. Now it’s not only the factory workers who are standing in unemployment lines, but the creative and educated class that once managed garment businesses.

From Bruce Raynor in the film:

The schmatta [garment] business included the sewers at the machines. It included the guy in the front office. It included the accountant, the typist…The fact is, millions of workers became middle class Americans and educated their children and produced doctors and lawyers and Supreme Court justices.

One union-member garment cutter who has been forced to retire early laments:

The garment industry is a microcosm of everything that is going on in this country. Right down the line we are losing not only blue collar jobs, we are losing white collar jobs. We are giving it all away. What happened?

What happened was the deregulation of American industry starting in the ‘70s and ‘80s, the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in the ‘90s, society’s devaluation of labor unions, and the rise of Wall Street’s demands for regular corporate profits. All of these factors combined to lure factories offshore in the quest for ever cheaper labor.

The garment industry is a casualty of the corporatization of America and our government.

Only when we again value the worker and recognize their role in maintaining a healthy economy and by extension, society, will the American economy regain its footing. It would certainly be nice if "Made in the U.S.A." was no longer an anomaly.